A Quote by Michael Levy, Baron Levy

How much Joy can a human mind encompass in one lifetime? — © Michael Levy, Baron Levy
How much Joy can a human mind encompass in one lifetime?
Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.
So deep and meaningful is the joy and the enthusiasm that is born in one's mind and heart by human love and helpfulness that it has the power to motivate for a lifetime. . . . You don't have to be a doctor to say or do that which puts light in a human eye or joy on a human face. Simply practice Jesus' commandment that we love one another. Go out and do something for somebody. These are the things that make happy people. Here is the one never-failing source of the joy and enthusiasm we are talking about.
In the mind, we doubt and suspect, and we get a kind of pleasure, a kind of joy from that. But in the heart, we try to encompass the full world, and by loving the world, we get joy.
For the real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can. Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it.
I was a human rights lawyer for 20 years, I believed those values of dignity, equality and non-discrimination were a given. believed the only question in my lifetime would be - how much further do we extend those values? I did not think in my lifetime we'd actually be having an argument about those values.
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy--a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.
Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'
I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.
Different ages have certain approaches, which may be more effective for one age and no longer effective in another age. The world that we live in now has much greater density to it; it is much more all-pervasive. And when I say "world," I include the human mind in it. The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger.
It's amazing how much the human mind and body can do and achieve.
Yours is a race whose imagination is limited to its own small appetites. Greed, lust, envy - these are the motivating forces of humankind. What redeems you is that in every man and woman there is a seed that can grow to encompass love, joy and compassion. But this seed is never allowed to prosper in fertile ground. It struggles for life among the rocks of your human soul.
I just love expressing my joy and my mind through what I wear, or how I cook, or how I dance, or how I write or perform a song - how I move.
The current perception I get from the evening news is that the world is dominated by human failure, crime, catastrophe, corruption, and tragedy. We are all tuning in to see how the human mind is evolving, but the media keeps hammering home the opposite, that the human mind is mired in darkness and folly.
I masturbate. A lot. And yet, I don't floss because it's too much of a hassle. Ten seconds of joy over a lifetime of tooth decay, that's what I've chosen.
How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping?
At the close of life the question will be not how much have you got, but how much have you given; not how much have you won, but how much have you done; not how much have you saved, but how much have you sacrificed; how much have you loved and served, not how much were you honored.
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