Quotes about delight
page 3

“When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Reading

“Akmon squealed with delight. “I knew you were as smart as Hercules! I will call you Black Bottom, the Sequel!”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Pt. V; see also the later phrasing of Malcolm Fraser, "life wasn't meant to be easy"
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Life, Courage, Courageous, Cute

“Your wit is always such a delight, Mr. Zeklos. I can barely contain myself around it.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

“If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”

James Baldwin book Sonny's Blues

Source: Sonny's Blues

Light, Suffering

“Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

God, Pleasure

“Delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Childhood

“I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Waiting, Good Morning, Moving On

“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Twentieth Century Faith : Hope and Survival (1972), p. 61
1970s

Children, People, Age, Religion

“Hazel screamed at the top of her lungs, but it was a scream of delight. For the first time in her life-in her two lives-she felt absolutely unstoppable.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Life, Time

“There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.”

Elizabeth Goudge book The Little White Horse

Source: The Little White Horse

“It was a delightful visit;-perfect, in being much too short.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

Perfection

“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Books

“Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view.”

Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987) Tibetan Buddhist lama and writer

Source: The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

Reality

“Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will's voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son's laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Parting

“Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention… the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”

Julia Cameron book The Artist's Way

Source: The Artist's Way

“Some people insist that “mediocre” is better than “best.” They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!”

Robert A. Heinlein book Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 9

People, Flying

“Each man delights in the work that suits him best.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XIV. 228 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Source: The Odyssey

“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer

God, Music, Soul

“She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Angels, Loneliness, Cry, Flying

“I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Context: 11. The Master answered and said "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all — young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going it's own way, knowing only its own crystal self.13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah come to save us all!'19. "And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."20. "But they cried the more, 'Savior!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior."

“She had a lively, playful disposition that delighted in anything ridiculous.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight, beyond the bliss of dreams.”

John Milton Comus

Source: Comus

Dreams

“Truth is a constant delight to those that love her; such beauty holds no power to offend.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Love, Truth, Beauty

“That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

Source: I Am Legend and Other Stories

Happiness, Drink

“You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight. You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself.”

Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) French writer

Love, Women, Singing, Cry

“The only way that I could figure they could improve upon Coca-Cola, one of life's most delightful elixirs, which studies prove will heal the sick and occasionally raise the dead, is to put bourbon in it.”

Lewis Grizzard (1946–1994) American journalist

Life, Way, Study, Dead

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Friendship, Children

“Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"Tell me A Story"

Time

“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

People, Housing, For Wife

“Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done—a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.”

Gene Bedell

Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way
—H. L. Mencken O

Men, Pleasure, Sense

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Feeling, Solitude

“I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

God, Pleasure, World, Learning

“The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

War, Fight

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, Foreword, p. vii (opening words).

“Adrian frowned.
'Is that a noose?'
'It's a tie!' I cried, trying not to feel offended. He laughed, clearly delighted at this.
'My mistake.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Feeling

“That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Time

“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Way

“It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Variant: A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Context: It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Love, Wisdom

“Grover and Nico came back from their walk, and Grover helped me fix up my wounded arm.
"It's green!" Nico said with delight.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Help

“Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Life, Books, Reading

“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey (1817)

Life, Beauty, Girl

“I've mastered many things in my life. Navigating the strets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms…”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Life, Women, Art, Flowers

“The woman is the most perfect doll that i have dressed with delight and admiration.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Perfection

“For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Love, Death, Beauty, Change

“I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

God, World, Learning

“It's so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.”

Agatha Christie Murder at the Vicarage

Source: Murder at the Vicarage

Secret

“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it.”

Brother Lawrence (1614–1691) French Christian monk

Life, God, World

“Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Pain, Solitude

“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Happiness

“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

World, Suffering

“To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.

[author's dedication]”

Agatha Christie The Secret Adversary

Source: The Secret Adversary

Hope

“Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Books

“June cackled with delight, muttering, "Whoops!" as a car almost killed them.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Cars

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Clod and the Pebble, st. 3
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)
Source: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Love, Hell, Loss, Joy

“Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Love, Thinking, Time

“That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Thinking

“Energy is eternal delight.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

“Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

World, Future

“One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Books

“To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Chapter I, Of The Definitions of Wealth and of Productive Labour, Section II, p. 49
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Communication, Country

“There is delight in singing, though none hear
Beside the singer.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

To Robert Browning (1846).

Singing

“I am delighted to inform you that in yesterday's sitting of the Cabinet it was unanimously agreed that your application of last August for authority to return to Germany should be sanctioned in principle…While acquainting Your Imperial Highness of the Cabinet's decision, I cannot forbear expressing my own personal pleasure that this decision was given by the Cabinet on my proposal, and, as I may permit myself to add, as reached unanimously and without objection or criticism, after my statement had been heard.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Letter to the ex-Crown Prince (24 October 1923), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 328-329
1920s

Pleasure, Decision, Personality

“We have been exceedingly busy ever since you went away. In the first place we have had to rejoice two or three times everyday at your having such very delightful weather for the whole of your journey…”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1800-11-25) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Business, Time, Weather

“Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 188

“There was no city, no town, no village, no wood, where the temples of the gods were unbroken. When Sureshavari, varaha and others were broken, the world trembled, but not so the mind of the wicked king. He forgot his kingly duties and took delight day and night in breaking images.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Jonraj: Rajtarangini

God, World, Night

“Ownership in the world I have none, but I have an infinite interest in it; for if not my own it is my God's; and so it is mine in a higher than a legal sense. Yes, this is the beauty, this is the whole sublimity, this is the tender delight of life — that it is of God's governing.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 620.

Life, God, World, Beauty

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3.

Love, Life, Death, Pain

“But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.”

Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) British historian

Christianity, Diplomacy and War (1953), p. 43.

“Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Love, War, Feeling, Spring

“Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around
With endless rebound:
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 4. <br class="br"> The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

Spring, Fight, Flying

“Indeed I have observed that even the Barbarians across the Rhine sing savage songs composed in language not unlike the croaking of harsh-voiced birds, and that they delight in such songs. For I think it is always the case that inferior musicians, though they annoy their audiences, give very great pleasure to themselves”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Julian, on the songs of the early Germans. As quoted in his Mispogon.
General sources

Pleasure, Bird, Thinking, Singing

“As translators, we must be courageous, free and passionate about what we are doing. We must constantly strive to enrich our own cultural and linguistic repertoire. We must read, we must write. We must be prepared to rethink, to revise, to rewrite, constantly. We must have endless time and patience. Deadlines are there to be ignored, to be kept alive. Above all we must play with words, ideas and feelings. Delight in them. We must never lose sight of the playfulness and creative licence that are the lifeblood of art and literature, and hence of translation.”

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

Public Lecture (2018)

Art, Feeling, Literature, Idea

“There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement. This special movement was discovered by the futurists as a new and hitherto unknown phenomenon in art, a phenomenon which some Futurists were delighted to reflect.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote c. 1915, in: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in his Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59
1910 - 1920

Art

“To me, through every season dearest;
In every scene, by day, by night,
Thou, present to my mind appearest
A quenchless star, forever bright;
My solitary sole delight:
Where’er I am, by shore—at sea—
I think of thee.”

David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851) Scottish physician and writer

When Thou at Eve art Roaming, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Star, Thinking, Sea, Night

“It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this reduction of the world to its components, the chemical elements. Such reduction does not destroy its charm but adds understanding to sensation, and this understanding only deepens our delight.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), p. 147-148

World, Understanding

“Beside a perfectly-timed boundary hit on a hard ground from fast bowling, all other delights of this life are a nothingness.”

John Snaith (1876–1936) British cricketer (1876-)

Willow the King (1899)

Life, Time

“A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky:
There eke the soft delights that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures always hover'd nigh;
But whate'er smack'd of noyance or unrest
Was far, far off expell'd from this delicious nest.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto I, Stanza 6.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Pleasure, Dreams, Summer

“I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser…”

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

World

“No generous mind delights to oppress the weak, but rather to cherish and protect.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Ralph

“Those who, like the present writer, never had the privilege of meeting Sidgwick can infer from his writings, and still more from the characteristic philosophic merits of such pupils of his as McTaggart and Moore, how acute and painstaking a thinker and how inspiring a teacher he must have been. Yet he has grave defects as a writer which have certainly detracted from his fame. His style is heavy and involved, and he seldom allowed that strong sense of humour, which is said to have made him a delightful conversationalist, to relieve the uniform dull dignity of his writing. He incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answers. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument: and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing. The result is that Sidgwick probably has far less influence at present than he ought to have, and less than many writers, such as Bradley, who were as superior to him in literary style as he was to them in ethical and philosophical acumen. Even a thoroughly second-rate thinker like T. H. Green, by diffusing a grateful and comforting aroma of ethical "uplift", has probably made far more undergraduates into prigs than Sidgwick will ever make into philosophers.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

Sense, Strong, Teachers, Reading

“My first manager's page for Shamrock Rovers, and my, shall I say, reasonably extensive vocabulary is still too confined to express how delighted I feel.”

Damien Richardson (1947) Irish footballer and manager

Shamrock Rovers versus St. Johnstone, 14 July 1999.

Feeling

“'Kant ought to be arrested and given three years in Solovki asylum for that "proof" of his!' Ivan Nikolayich burst out completely unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' whispered Berlioz, embarrassed. But the suggestion to pack Kant off to an asylum not only did not surprise the stranger but actually delighted him. 'Exactly, exactly!' he cried and his green left eye, turned on Berlioz glittered. 'That's exactly the place for him! I said to him myself that morning at breakfast: "If you'll forgive me, professor, your theory is no good. It may be clever but it's horribly incomprehensible. People will think you're mad."' Berlioz's eyes bulged. At breakfast… to Kant?”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Book One in 'Never Talk to Strangers', MG, here Woland, Berlioz and Ivan are talking about Kant's views on existence of God
The Master and Margarita (1967)

People, Forgiveness, Thinking, Madness

“The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

God

“It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

People, Art

“The person of faith, in ritual or worship, while reciting a prayer, singing a psalm, and invoking a mantra, feels deep within a communion that, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, transforms the lead and copper of animal existence into the silver and gold of divine delight.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 176
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Faith, Feeling, Singing, Animals

“You don't want to go to Miami. Everybody's always delighted with it--no! Listen! The temperature down there is always over ninety and the humidity--and here's the problem--is way over 100%, way. And you know how it's over 100% humidity? When you're walking down the street for five minutes thinking to yourself, "You know, I should have put deodorant on my balls."”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

That's over a hundred. Because that's not something you'd think of on your own.
The White Album (2000)

Way, Problem, Thinking

“O the one who is as dear as life to Rāma, O the delightful one, O the power of Rāma, O the one with eyes like lotuses, O queen, O Sītā, grant me the most beautiful devotion towards Rāma. ॥ 14.28 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

rāmaprāṇapriye rāme rame rājīvalocane ।
rāhi rājñi ratiṃ ramyāṃ rāme rājani rāghave ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Life, Beauty

“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Quotes

“But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

La satire, en leçons, en nouveautés fertile,
Sait seule assaisonner le plaisant et l'utile,
Et, d'un vers qu'elle épure aux rayons du bons sens,
Détromper les esprits des erreurs de leur temps.
Satire 9
Satires (1716)

Age, Sense

“"I almost wish I were not a painter," observed my companion.
"Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature."
"No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit."”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Helen to Gilbert

Nature, Thinking, Time