Quotes about Delight

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,
but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.  To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.

I do not know who lives here in my chest.
Or why the smile comes.
Am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that
lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind.

"Who is to judge one flower to be a weed and another to be a delight? The weed was a delight unto itself before judgment arrived. Now it is rejected, deprived of love and must spread to be noticed, to make its call heard. It is all one movement of life, regardless if it be a thunderstorm or an august night. To acknowledge my brother's sovereignty, to allow him the right to be however he wishes to be, it to set him free. So, the answer to the question, how to embrace my adversary, is always: embrace what you feel. This brings us back to our own attitude. If it is hate we feel or hate's milder form, which is dislike, then we embrace this emotion all the same--and without judgment, If the person's conduct is so unpleasant that his presence becomes intolerable we can remove ourself. It this is not possible, then we take action not in the form of attack but rather as a mother corrects a misbehaving child. This can be done without any judgment. The essence of this learning is this: we only experience the person or situation as unlovable because polarities were singled out and judged. We see but ourself in the other person, hence judging him is judging ourself. We would never experience an unlovable person or condition if we embraced every person or condition and welcomed them without judgment."

Let your one delight and refreshment be to pass from one service to the community to another, with God ever in mind.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation, comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles.
Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of sabbaths.

The proper posture for the creature is one of receptivity. In Perelandra we see several ways in which this posture could be corrupted or destroyed. First it is always possible to seek ways to assure ourselves of repeating the pleasure. This is what makes money so suspect in Lewis' eyes - it is a means by which we assure ourselves that we can have the pleasure whenever we want it. It provides a measure of independence. One no longer has to throw oneself into the wave. Second, even when one pleasure is given, it is (as the Lady discovered) possible to turn from what is given to something which is (thought to be) preferred. And this, in turn, is what makes a life oriented toward the future suspect for Lewis - to commit too much of one's hopes and happiness to the future will make impossible the posture of receptivity appropriate to a creature.

In either case-whether we try to secure means for repeating the pleasure at will or turn from what is given to something else which is desired - Lewis thinks that we will eventually lose the capacity for delighting in what is received. For to treat a created thing as something more than that is to destroy its true character. To seek in any created thing a complete fulfillment of the longing which moves us is to make of it an object of infinite desire and, because it is only a created thing, a false infinite. It may still be sweet, at least for a time, because it is intended by its Giver to be a source of delight. But in the end it will be poison for the person who gives his heart only to it. Hence the constant temptation: the lure of the sweet poison of the false infinite.

To be fully human involves a certain stance toward the things of creation: delighting in things without seeking security in them.

The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.