“In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. ‘Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,’ René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. ‘Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.’ And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,’ Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of the most important things I have learned about life.”

Maria Popova