I DEFINE JOY AS A SUSTAINED SENSE OF WELL-BEING AND PEACE–A CONNECTION TO WHAT MATTERS.
–OPRAH
“Surely joy is the condition of life.”
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
“To love what you do and feel that it matters—how can anything be more fun?”
“There may be times in a girl’s life when it’s better to be boyless, but there’s no need to be joyless. Or toyless.”
“I know for sure that I don’t want to live a shut-down life—desensitized to feeling, seeing, and the possibility of experiencing joy on every level. I want every day to be a fresh start on expanding what is possible. And I also know that one person can make a huge difference.”
“You’re worried about how you’re going to feel at the end of your life? What about right now? Live. Right this minute. That’s where the joy’s at.”
“In my music, I try to be as truthful as I can. I’m not sure I can be as honest in my life as I can be in my music, because with manners comes insincerity. Like ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m very well.’ But I’m not. I have a massive hangover…Joy is the hardest possible thing to contrive as an act.”
“In life there will be sickness, devastation, heartache—it’s a given…If you look hard enough, you can always find the bright side.”
“Play is one of those things—like dreaming—that seems superfluous but we cannot live without…Good play, by nature, is therapeutic…While trauma and threat tend to take away the desire for playfulness, they intensify the need for it. To live through uncertain times, we cannot exist solely in a state of apprehension.”
“To be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.”
“My former boss, the general manager, said to me, ‘There’s no way you can make it in Chicago up against Donahue’…He used every tactic he could muster to entice me to stay—more money, a company car, a new apartment, and finally, intimidation: ‘You’re going to fail.’…I gathered the nerve to say to him before standing up to walk out, ‘You’re right, I may not make it, and I may be walking into unforeseen land mines. But if they don’t kill me, at least I’ll keep growing. I’ve grown all I can here. I have to move on.’ In that moment, I chose happiness.”
“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end.”
“I’m always happy with whatever I have. If I can get something else, great. If I lose half of everything tomorrow, fine. That’s why I don’t buy anything on credit. If everything is over with now, I still have what I have. If everything ended tomorrow, I’d say, ‘Well, I did okay. That was a good run.’”
“Getting what you go after is success; but liking it while you are getting it is happiness.”
“It’s not that I’m sweet as pie every day at work. But I take work as a joyous responsibility.”
“Money often compounds unhappiness because, mistakenly, we think that spending will make us feel better…When you’re happy, you create your own financial stability by living within your means.”
“How do you find what’s going to make everybody have this strange reaction in their bodies, this response that’s sort of chemical and physical at once—this noise and emotion that changes how you sit? A laugh is a weird sound…But when I can feel proud of myself for causing it, it’s really great.”
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure, nor this thing nor that, but simply growth.”
“The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.”
“Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: it’s good to be silly at the right moment.”
“Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.”
“You may feel stuck—trapped in a bad relationship, grieving over a divorce, miserably and interminably single—but it is in your power, and your best health interest, to choose joy. Okay, so you can’t find romance. Or your soul mate doesn’t feel the same way about you. But you can put yourself in the path of happiness. You can fall in love with life.”
“The worst sin—perhaps the only sin—passion can commit, is to be joyless.”
“I take my pleasure seriously. I work hard and pleasure well; I believe in the yin and yang of life. It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy because I take pleasure from everything I do.”
“To understand the true nature of pleasure, borrow an amiable infant. Dip your finger in sugar, offer it to the baby, and watch her intently gum the treat. As the sensation of sweetness fires various brain synapses, the baby’s facial muscles will relax. Her tongue will protrude, flick in and out. A dreamy smile may light up her face. This is one happy baby.”
“Sometimes I laugh out loud just remembering someone else laughing out loud. Why does it feel so good to make someone laugh? Because it’s a selfish and generous action, both at the same time…When we make others laugh, it’s exhilarating. It means someone was actually listening to us. Laughter also releases endorphins that ease pain, heartache, or sadness (or so the story goes). What a gift.”
“Music enters our bodies, commandeering the pulse in our veins, and reminds us that pleasure isn’t a matter of feeling good but of feeling more alive.”
“What I know for sure is that pleasure is energy reciprocated. What you put out comes back. Your base level of pleasure is determined by how you view your whole life.”
“Most of us are brought up to think the key to happiness lies outside ourselves. We look to falling in love, having a family, making a career, or building a dream house, and we expect that these levels of accomplishment will be enough. But often we find that when one level of need is satisfied, another takes its place.”
“If we’re stuck with having expectations, there’s a very good reason to embrace positive ones: it’s that we often create what we anticipate.”
“It is possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis.”
“One can get just as much exultation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be so recklessly lost in a daisy!”
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.”
“When you die, God and the angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasure you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.”
“As we watch someone else partake of the stockpile of joy, our hearts may sink—we’re not going to get our share. But someone else’s pleasure doesn’t cause our unhappiness—we make ourselves unhappy because our negativity isolates us. An alternative to feeling painfully cut off is to learn to rejoice in the happiness of others.”
“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.”
“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
“Joy is prayer. Joy is strength. Joy is love. Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.”
“True happiness…arises in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self.”
“Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy.”
“Winning is important to me, but what brings me joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I’m doing.”
“No self-help book, e-retailer, or bossy sister can tell you what will give you pleasure. To find it, you have to divine yourself, listen for a particular note, or be alert to a gentle itch of interest, then follow it through the maw and negative voices. And when you’ve gotten there, what you’ve found probably speaks profoundly to who you really are. That person is worth getting to know.”
“Happiness depends on ourselves.”
“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe.”
“Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.”
“Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.”
“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?”
“Follow your bliss.”
“Joy is not in things; it is in us.”
“When we blame our lack of joy on a lack of money, we are confusing who we are with what we have…True wealth is not measured by bank account balances alone but by the richness of your life on every level.”
“All I can say about life is, Oh God, enjoy it!”
“There is no such thing as a ‘finished’ person; whatever your circumstances are, it is your challenge to keep asking yourself the tough question that will move you forward in your life. What I’ve discovered is that joy isn’t waiting on the other side of that process; joy is that process…The greatest joy lies not in simply being but in becoming.”
“Joy and hope are never separate. I have never met a hopeful person who was depressed or a joyful person who had lost hope…It is important to become aware that at every moment of our life we have the opportunity to choose joy. It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom to love.”
“I do not always practice what I preach and sit down to eat with all my family, but rather feed them and then sneak upstairs to eat my supper in bed. I compound this sin, but also my pleasure somehow, by not having a tray. I love beautiful linens and adore my bed, but I am uncaring about the spill-age and drips and crumbs I leave in my lazy, greedy wake.”
“During truffle season, I have pasta or risotto with white truffles, cream, and butter—multiple occasions a month. It’s hallelujah time. I plan ahead, and I’m fanatical about it.”
“Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and step out and dance—to live free of regret and filled with as much joy, fun, and laughter as you can stand. You can either waltz boldly onto the floor of life and live the way you know your spirit is nudging you to, or you can sit quietly by the wall, receding in the shadows of fear and self-doubt. You have the choice this very moment—the only moment you have for certain.”
“Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.”
“Why learn a piece of music unless it’s to be performed? Why knit a sweater unless it’s to be given to a loved one? We think everything we do has to be up to snuff and we forget that the pure, uncensored joy of living in our skin comes when we are not attached, 24-7, to either our fans or our critics. We can paint just for ourselves. We can belt out torch songs in an empty office.”
“Humor can turn the serious into the bearable, the humiliating into the humbling, the mundane into the unique.”
“I DEFINE JOY AS A SUSTAINED SENSE OF WELL-BEING AND PEACE–A CONNECTION TO WHAT MATTERS…WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE IS THAT YOU FEEL REAL JOY IN DIRECT PROPORTION TO HOW CONNECTED YOU ARE TO LIVING YOUR TRUTH.”
–OPRAH