If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment. --Carlos Santana (in Against Self-Righteousness)

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. -- Kahlil Gibran (in The Geography of Sorrow)

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma. --Elizabeth Gilbert (in The Power of Everyday Rituals)

Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it. --Diane Ackerman (in Diane Ackerman: 100 Names for Love)

Until we define happiness for ourselves, clearly seeing the difference between excitement and joy, for example, our habits will likely not change. We will keep returning to the fruits of our desires --Judson Brewer (in A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit)

The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace --Eckhart Tolle (in Accepting What Is)

There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyze. --George McDonald (in Deep Water-- A Conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee)

Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. --Helen Keller (in Seven Ways to Live in the Direction of Your Purpose)

Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. --Pema Chodron (in Meeting Our Pain With Compassion)

What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying. I'm saying: What if that is joy? --Ross Gay (in Joining Our Wildernesses)

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
--John O'Donohue (in A Blessing for A Baby Coming Into This World)

Grief and joy and love -- it's all part of the same spectrum. I'm grieving because I loved someone so much. --Maryanne O'Hara (in Death Doulas Provide End of Life Aid)

Joy is an act of rebellion. And so is allowing ourselves to feel our grief. --Octavia Raheem (in Black Joy in Pursuit of Racial Justice)

What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? --Ross Gay (in Ross Gay: Inciting Joy)

So pain pushes until vision pulls and I have a muscle that I've developed to help people see the vision, to pull them through the pain, and it's a privilege to do it and it's a joy. --Lynne Twist (in Finding Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger than You)

"Now shall I walk, or should I ride?

"Ride," Pleasure said.

"Walk," Joy replied. --W.H. Davies (in Metaphors of Movement)

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass has the power to move you, rejoice, for your soul is alive. --Eleonora Duse (in An Awe Walk)