C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Enjoyment
He scatters enjoyment who can enjoy much.
They most enjoy the world who least admire.
Be merry if you are wise.
Enjoy the present day, trusting little to the morrow.
The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils, even if equal in number.
Sleep, riches, and health are only truly enjoyed after they have been interrupted.
The less you can enjoy, the poorer, the scantier yourself,—the more you can enjoy, the richer, the more vigorous.
Temper your enjoyments with prudence, lest there be written upon your heart that fearful word “satiety.”
Heaven forbids, it is true, certain gratifications, but there are ways and means of compounding such matters.
Pound St. Paul’s Church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is, to be sure, good for nothing; but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul’s Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shown to be very insignificant.
All solitary enjoyments, quickly pall, or become painful, or become painful, so that, perhaps, no more insufferable misery can be conceived than that which must follow incommunicable privileges. Only imagine a human being condemned to perpetual youth while all around him decay and die. O, how sincerely would he call upon death for deliverance!
You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight.
Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by immovable boundaries, and has set different gratifications at such a distance from each other, that no art or power can bring them together. This great law it is the business of every rational being to understand, that life may not pass away in an attempt to make contradictions consistent, to combine opposite qualities, and to unite things which the nature of their being must always keep asunder.
Ye men of gloom and austerity, who paint the face of Infinite Benevolence with an eternal frown, read in the everlasting book, wide open to your view, the lesson it would teach. Its pictures are not in black and sombre hues, but bright and glowing tints; its music—save when ye drown it—is not in sighs and groans, but songs and cheerful sounds. Listen to the million voices in the summer air, and find one dismal as your own.