{"quotes":[{"text":"I don’t remember now who took the photo of us, but I’ve had it in my room for years. We’re leaning out of our windows and we’re laughing at each other with joyfulness purer than anything to do with the polite smiling you get used to doing when you get older. The photo has the kind of proper smiles that happen when you’re looking straight into the face of someone who’s been your best friend for a long time.","author":"Sarah Moore Fitzgerald","tags":["happiness","happy","joy","joyfulness","laughing","laughter","smiling","smiling-face"],"id":2216,"author_id":"Sarah+Moore+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. \tYou are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. \t“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":16223,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":32108,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Life is a daring adventure.I am enjoying every bit of the joyful journey.","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["adventure","adventure-fantasy","adventure-travel","daring","daring-greatly","daringness","journey-of-life","journeys-in-life","joyful","joyful-living","joyful-living","joyfulness","life"],"id":47431,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"},{"text":"Life can only be filled with joys as we make our egos small enough to accept the fact that joy comes to those in whom there is only room for it to spill over.","author":"S. Emmanuel Epps","tags":["ego","joy","joyful","joyfulness"],"id":49967,"author_id":"S.+Emmanuel+Epps"},{"text":"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what?\t I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","longing","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","ring-the-bells","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":51793,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"She wasn’t just a faithful friend, she was the closest thing to heaven I allowed myself to know. Through her I received joy in my heart and began to love others.","author":"Jennifer Skiff","tags":["faithful","faithfulness","friendship","heaven","joy","joyfulness","love"],"id":67198,"author_id":"Jennifer+Skiff"},{"text":"A sense of humor helps us to get through the dull times, cope with the difficult times, enjoy the good times and manage the scary times.","author":"Steve Goodier","tags":["coping","difficuties","enjoyment-of-life","humor","joy","joyfulness","laugh","laughing","sense-of-humor"],"id":68991,"author_id":"Steve+Goodier"},{"text":"If you feel all damp and lonely like a mushroom, find the thick, creamy soup of joyfulness and just dive into it in order to make life tastier.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["alone","creamy","damp","dive","feel","joyfulness","life","life-lessons","life-philosophy","life","lonely","lonliness","mushroom","mushrooms","philosophy","philosophy-of-life","solitude","soup"],"id":76291,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"A joyful life,reaching out to people from all walks of life.","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["encourage-literature-and-culture","encouragement-and-attitude","encouragement","encouragment","inspirational","inspired","inspired","inspired-soul","joy","joy-of-life","joyful","joyful-living","joyful-living-living","joyful-living","joyful-living","joyful","joyful","joyful-thankful","joyfulness","life-philosophy","life","people","people-person","people","people-relations","walk","walks","walks-of-life","wonder","wonderful-dream","wonderful-heat","wonderful-life","wonderful-soul","wonderful-things"],"id":84260,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":59,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}