"You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore." -- Psalm 16:11
C.S. Lewis, *The Weight of Glory: *
"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."
G.K. Chesterton, *Orthodoxy: *
"Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul."
Athanasius, *On the Incarnation*, §9-10
"The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death. Yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father's Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all."
Cyprian of Carthage, *On the Lord's Prayer: *
"We do not ask that God's will be done in the sense that He should do His own will -- we ask that His will be done in us. It is for us to do God's will -- to be in it, to be shaped by it, to surrender to it. And so we pray: *Thy will be done in me, as it is done in heaven.*"
What if the joy you are chasing is only a shadow of the Presence you are avoiding?
Cato the Younger, as recorded in Plutarch, *Life of Cato the Younger: *
"He did not think that a man's virtue consisted in toil and hardship alone, but in the life where justice, temperance, and steadiness are exercised without constraint -- where you govern yourself not because you must, but because you will it."
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