Joy is inexplicable peace that comes from within.

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.

Joy is a net of love in which you can catch souls.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in unison. Joy often involves self-forgetting.

Rejoice that you are in prison. Here you can think of your soul.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

I am happy in my prison of passion

Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.

joy is not found in the things which surround us, but lives only in the soul.

Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.

Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden and unforced. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. At those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not hear the orchestra’s delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace — a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life.