James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
W. R. Greg
God is not so poor in felicities or so niggard in His bounty that He has not wherewithal to furnish forth two worlds.
God, through the voice of Nature, calls the mass of men to be happy; He calls a few among them to the grander task of being severely but serenely sad.
He is just as truly running counter to God’s will by being intentionally wretched as by intentionally doing wrong.
If a man with the material of enjoyment around him and virtually within his reach walks God’s earth wilfully and obstinately with a gloomy spirit,… making misery his worship, we feel assured he is contravening his Maker’s design in endowing him with life.
Life was spread as a banquet for pure, noble, unperverted natures, and may be such to them, ought to be such to them.
Not one of our faculties that it is not a delight to exercise.
Not one of our senses that, in its healthy state, is not an avenue to enjoyment.
The cup of life which God offers to our lips is not always sweet;… but, sweet or bitter, it is ours to drink it without murmur or demur.
The earth is sown with pleasures, as the heavens are studded with stars, wherever the conditions of existence are unsophisticated.
The happiness of the human race is one of the designs of God, but our own individual happiness must not be made our first or our direct aim.
These cases, wherein happiness would be sinful, are just as much, but no more, the ordainments of Providence as those more common ones wherein happiness is natural and right.
To serve God and love him is higher and better than happiness, though it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brow, and a heart loaded with sorrow.
Virtue, not misery, is the appointed road to heaven.
We are to earn the joys of a higher existence, not by scorning, but by using, all the gifts of God in this.
We can conceive or desire nothing more exquisite or perfect than what is round us every hour.