For the people, the church is a kind of celestial tavern, just as the tavern is a sort of celestial church on earth. In church and tavern alike they forget, at least momentarily, their hunger, their oppression, and their humiliation, and they try to dull the memory of their daily afflictions, in the one with mindless faith and in the other with wine. One form of intoxication is as good as the other.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. — Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy

When the world does not hold and bind you, it becomes an abode of joy and beauty. You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it.

One joy dispels a hundred cares.

"What old illusion of hope is not here forever repeated! Says the soul of the toiler
to itself, "I shall soon be free. I shall be in the ways and the hosts of the merry. The
streets, the lamp, the lighted chamber set for dining are for me. The theatres, the halls,
the parties, the ways of rest and the paths of song — these are mine in the night." Though
all humanity be still enclosed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air. The
dullest feel something which they may not always express or describe. It is the lifting of
the burden of toil."

It's such a happiness when good people get together.

Shaking off, with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober.

oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating.

What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty.

Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

The happiest of all things is when an old friend comes and greets us as in former times; the heart is comforted with the assurance that some day everything that we have loved will be given back

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness