Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Joy
Sadness, or great joy, equally dissipate the spirits, and immoderate exercise in hot air, with unquenched thirst.
John Arbuthnot.
Joy causeth a cheerfulness and vigour in the eyes; singing, leaping, dancing, and sometimes tears: all these are the effects of the dilatation and coming forth of the spirits into the outward parts.
The coming into a fair garden, the coming into a fair room richly furnished, a beautiful person, and the like, do delight and exhilarate the spirits much.
Exhilaration hath some affinity with joy, though it be a much lighter motion.
He has a secret spring of spiritual joy and the continual feast of a good conscience within, that forbids him to be miserable.Richard Bentley.
Unalloyed satisfactions are joys too heavenly to fall to many men’s shares on earth.Robert Boyle.
Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good.
Methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears; and the sweet odour of the returning gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrance of heaven.
To these we have the examples of the Roman lady who died for joy to see her son safe returned from the defeat of Cannæ; and of Sophocles, and Dionysius the tyrant, who died of joy; and of Talva, who died in Corsica, reading news of the honours the Roman senate had decreed in his favour. We have moreover one, in the time of Pope Leo the tenth, who upon news of the taking of Milan, a thing he had so ardently and passionately desir’d, was rapt with so sudden an excess of joy that he immediately fell into a fever and died.Michel de Montaigne: Essays, Cotton’s 3d ed., ch. ii.
True joy is a serene and sober motion; and they are miserably out that take laughing for rejoicing: the seat of it is within, and there is no cheerfulness like the resolutions of a brave mind, that has fortune under its feet.Seneca.
The lightsome passion of joy was not that which now often usurps the name; that trivial, vanishing, superficial thing that only gilds the apprehensions, and plays upon the surface of the soul.Robert South.
If we are not extremely foolish, thankless, or senseless, a great joy is more apt to cure sorrow than a great trouble is.Jeremy Taylor.
