C. S. Lewis Quotes About Joy
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Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
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When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
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It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
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The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
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I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
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Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.
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Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
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If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
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There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
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Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.
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With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
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The action of Pity leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.
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Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.
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Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
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Every joy is beyond all others.
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She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then --Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
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There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
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We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
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Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.
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Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy? Should we not reply, With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleansed first. It may hurt, you know-even so, sir.
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Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is
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No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
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Joy is the serious business of heaven.
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Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.
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Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.
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All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
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And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
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In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.
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but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy
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