“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
Book of Psalms, c. 500 BC · Hebrew songbook
Chapter 2
On Joy
“Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart.”
Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC · Hebrew book of the Preacher
“He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sun rise.”
William Blake, 1793 · English poet and engraver
“My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a watered shoot. My heart is gladder than all these, because my love is come to me.”
Christina Rossetti, 1861 · English Victorian poet
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1877 · Scottish novelist and essayist
“For each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay, in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy.”
Emily Dickinson, 1859 · American poet of Amherst
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”
Kahlil Gibran, 1923 · Lebanese American poet and painter
“And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”
William Wordsworth, 1807 · English Romantic poet of the Lake District
“O the joy of my spirit, it is uncaged, it darts like lightning.”
Walt Whitman, 1860 · American poet and wartime nurse
Positive emotions do more than feel good. They widen attention and thought, and over time they build lasting reserves of skill, health, and friendship.
Barbara L. Fredrickson, 2001 · psychologist who proposed the broaden-and-build theory
When researchers compared the happiest tenth of students with the rest, one difference stood above all others: rich, close, sustained relationships.
Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, 2002 · psychologists studying the happiest people
Free to read, always. Liking a verse or leaving a comment happens in the app, so the conversation has a name attached to it.