Anyone who’s looked into a newborn’s innocent eyes should realize how incredible it is to be blessed with a new life.

It’s a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one’s direction seconds after its birth.

The revealed Word awakened me, but it was the preached Word that saved me, and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren’t joyful. They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!

To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

I have wondered about time all my life.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

Children make your life important.

Our Heavenly Father loves you. He has created you to be successful and to have joy.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.

If you’re not careful to think and speak words of faith, worry will creep in, and it will not only steal your peace and joy, it will steal your ‚today.‘ The present is the greatest gift God ever gives us. So hold on to the peace that’s yours in Christ. Don’t let it go.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.