Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.
Interpretation
Joy is a deeper and more profound feeling than mere fun.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett contrasts joy with fun by illustrating joy as a vast, unfathomable experience akin to the deep sea, while fun is likened to the shallow, limited nature of a puddle. This highlights that joy encompasses a richer emotional experience that transcends mere amusement and entertainment, suggesting that true joy resonates within us and is more substantial than fleeting pleasures.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing true happiness over temporary pleasures, one might quote this.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.
Every cell in your body is seeking fulfillment through joy, beauty, love and appreciation.
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity...In a state of flow, you're neither bored nor anxious, and you don't question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing.
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
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