If the day and night be such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. – J. D. Salinger

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming — a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from Frenc