Quotes about Joy

he rewards our efforts with peace and joy.

Happiness can get boring, because it is the satisfaction of our desires, and we know what we desire. (Can you desire what you do not know?) Joy never gets boring because it transcends our desires and surprises them with gifts.

That divine presence explains the joy the Jews felt so passionately when they went to their temple and which we find expressed in their Psalms. If we don't have as much joy in our churches as they had, it can only be because we don't have as much faith and love toward that divine presence as they had. And yet we have the presence of the same God in an even more complete and more concrete form in Christ, who is God incarnate, fully divine and fully human.

It also works the other way around: the more you love any person (human or divine), the more you want to know him (or Him) better, and the more you do. And this always causes deep joy.

Suffering together builds togetherness, and if togetherness is more important for us and for our joy than freedom from suffering is, then God is good to allow this suffering.

However, when once perfect happiness has been attained, nothing will remain to be desired because then there will be full enjoyment of God

desire will be at rest, not only our desire for God but all our desires; so that the joy of the blessed is full to perfection—indeed, over-full, since they will obtain more than they were capable of desiring

The most serious religious objection to Purgatory, on the part of Protestants, is that the anticipation of the pains of Purgatory detracts from a happy death ("blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord"—Rev 14:13). But that is like saying that the pains of labor detract from the joy of childbirth. Deferred happiness is still happiness. In

Yet one's joy will be greater than another's on account of a fuller participation of the divine happiness

Love is supposed to bring us out of the dark prison of the "my will be done" ego into the joys of "thy will be done", both horizontally and vertically, toward both the human and the divine Other.

Play and mirth is also "necessary for the intercourse of human life" and "to cheer the heart of man". This is why God invented not just water but also wine (Ps 104:15).

I expect that in Heaven, the angels will sing Bach, and they'll envy us our understanding of Beethoven. The unfallen angels don't have to go through the first movements of the 9th symphony to get to the Ode to Joy. But we do.