THE POWER OF FIRE

'"If everyone sat in front of a fire once a week," he said, "the people who made tranquillizers would go out of business.'"

Laurie Colwin, Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object, p.107.

TRUE HAPPINESS

'To be truly happy, a person's highest needs must be met and satisfied. The requirements of our wonderously created constition must all be met.'

JC Ryle, Happiness, p.14.

THE FRAGILITY OF HAPPINES

'Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting, and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it's something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like old threads in the world's fabric. They ought to be seized.'

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, p.121.

REAL HAPPINESS

'The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.48.

WHAT IS BLESSEDNESS?

'The Bible is filled with promises of "blessedness." The Hebrew word means far more then mere happiness. It means multidimensional flourishing. In Genesis 3 we see that sin puts us in a condition where we are in contradiction with God, our true selves, other human beings, and even nature itself. We are out of alignment with the creation order in all its dimensions, and so our normal human state consists of spiritual emptiness, inner anxiety and crises of identity, conflicts between nations, classes, and races, and the destruction of our natural environment.

To be blessed, then, is to know partial but substantial healing of each of these areas as God's salvation repairs our hearts and out behavior. Spiritually we reconcile with and grow closer to God. Psychologically we come to understand ourselves and find our feelings and actions coming more more under the Spirit's control. Relationally we discover the added depth and dimension that common faith can add to human friendship. Socially we find ways to serve neighbors and the broader civic community, no longer captive to political ideologies. Salvation is not merely forgiveness and admission to heaven. It means life is healed, slowly but surely, in all its dimensions.'

Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Way of Wisdom, p.58.

THE HAPPINESS OF HOLINESS

'They that walk in a way of holiness, do obtain in this world the gratification of those spiritual appetites in a degree for the discoveries of God's glory , and the views of Christ's beauty, and in the incomes of the holy spirit, whereby the soul is filled with joy of the Holy Ghost. They feed on angel's food, on the bread which came down from heaven and have the foretastes of heaven's dainties.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.163.

ALL OF LIFE IS SACRAMENTAL

'Edwards teaches us, then, of the God-centredness of all joy in this fallen world. He reminds us that the formula of joy is not God and _____ so much as God in _____. Christ is not one more element to fit into an already packed schedule - one more item on a growing list of priorities. Knowing Christ means seeing all of life in a new way, with new glasses. Jesus Christ gives meaning to all properties, not only heading the list but coloring every one with new and exciting meaning. To become a Christian is to make all of life sacramental. "From him and though him and to him are all things" (Rom.11:36). True joy derives not from God and job, family, sex, friends, food, rest, driving, buying a home, reading a book, drinking coffee - but from God in these things.'

Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.77.

ULTIMATE JOY

'Ultimate joy comes not from a lover or a landscape or a home, but through them...They point to what is "higher up" and "further back."'

Cornelius Plantinga in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.77.

GOD ALONE SATIFIES

'A soul that is capable of God can be filled with nothing else but God; nothing but God can fill a soul that is capable of God.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.43. 

GOD'S FORGIVENESS IS THE MOST READILY AVAILABLE FORGIVENESS

'The good news is that it's easier to be restored to a positive relationship with God than with any other being. As difficult as this is to grasp, when we do, it's happiness making in the extreme.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does Want Us to Be Happy? p.110.  

JOY = HAPPINESS

'The notion that we can have joy without happiness has perverted the meaning of both words and helped spawn a culture of Christian curmudgeons. Feeling morally superior, they may affirm that they have the joy of Jesus deep in their hearts, but apparently it's so deep it never makes the way to their faces.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does God Want Us to Be Happy? p.48. 

OUR CHRONIC DISSATISFACTION

'We are ruled by the clock. By the light bulb. By the glowing smartphone. By the insatiable feeling we are encouraged to have. The feeling of this is never enough. Our happiness is just around the corner. A single purchase, or interaction, or click, away. Waiting, glowing, like the light at the end of the tunnel that we can never quite reach.'

Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet, p.143.

HAPPINES

'He has begun to think of happiness as a power of mind, to be cultivated like thought and imagination. Because he has come to the age when he must think of such things, he recalls the times when he has been happy against reason, and for no reason. He recalls the times when has been happy for reasons so small and ephemeral that nobody has learned to charge for them: a bright-colored tiny bird feeding in the top of the tallest sycamore, a bird's song, a wild flower, a butterfly, a briar heavy with ripe berries, the sound of a beloved voice, the touches of loved ones. To miss or refuse the happiness of such free, small, beautiful, and passing things would be dangerous, he thinks. It would dishonour life itself, Heaven itself. It would be ingratitude.' 

Wendell Berry, 'The Order of Loving Care' in The Art of Loading Brush, p.216. 

CONTENTMENT

'...one of those people who claim little because they know they have enough.' 

Ronald Blythe (on Fidelity Cranbrook), The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, p.71. 

HAPPINESS VS. JOY

'Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us. Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening but every once in a while rises up out of simply being alive, of being part of the terror as well as the fathomless riches of the world that God has made.'  

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home, p.128. 

HAPPINESS

'A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of human happiness and misery arises from the view of our past conduct, and from the degree of approbation or disapprobation which we feel from the consideration of it.'

Adam Smith in Mark Vernon, The Meaning of Friendship, p.36.

ATTENTION MANAGEMENT

'Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention in the sine qua non of the good life and the key to virtually every aspect of your experience.' 

Winifred Gallagher in Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, p.77. 

HAPPINESS

'Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket?

Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket?'

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p.68.

FRIENDSHIP

'When I looked at him I could feel a grin coming across my soul.'

Wendell Berry, 'The Discovery of Kentucky' in That Distant Land, p.261.

PROGRESS

',...one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.'

Wendell Berry, 'Pray Without Ceasing' in That Distant Land, p.49.