In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they'd be off TV. They're not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we'd know who she was?
What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
Man was made for joy and woe, and when this we rightly know through the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul to bind.
If there ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness cannot come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you need to have more than one trait. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens.
But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies, and, put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.
PAIN was no longer a cause of suffering, but a source of pleasure, Because they were redeeming humanity from its sins. Pain becomes joy, the meaning of life, pleasure.