As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast — alternately tempestuous and serene — so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

But that had been grief — this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge:
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash'd from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.

A chaos of mind and body - a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight - a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity - an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects - a heart to ache or swell- a joy so joyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them...

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.

Great hour! Spent together, rejoicing and dreaming. Days and years are gathering. We are a still island in the ocean of the world. Beginning and end! Border between life and eternity! Euphoria, fulfillment, existence!