The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.
Richard Bach

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
Rudyard Kipling

Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Lewis Carroll

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.
Mary Wollstonecraft

Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Henry Miller

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'
Henry Miller

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
William Butler Yeats

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
William Butler Yeats

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Marquis de Sade

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
Charles Dickens

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
Alice Walker

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
Rene Descartes

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.
Henry Ward Beecher

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
William Wordsworth

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer