Love Quote by Henry Van Dyke

Van Dyke’s line is optimism with muscle: not a mood, a discipline. “Be glad of life” sounds like a greeting card until you notice how quickly he pins that gladness to verbs. Life isn’t justified by achievement or comfort; it’s justified by access. The “chance” to love, to work, to play, to look up at the stars turns existence into a set of permissions, a brief lease on experiences that are both ordinary and cosmic.

The sequencing matters. Love comes first, but it’s not left alone as a private sanctuary. Work follows, not as Puritan punishment but as a way of participating in the world rather than merely consuming it. Play arrives as a correction to the moral seriousness of labor, implying a full human life needs useless joy, not just productivity. Then the stars: the sudden upward glance that pulls the whole sentence out of self-help and into awe. It’s a small rhetorical twist that makes the earlier items feel less like a checklist and more like a philosophy: affection, effort, delight, wonder.

Context helps explain the confident steadiness. Van Dyke wrote in an America thick with social gospel thinking and late-Victorian moral uplift, when “good life” rhetoric often doubled as civic instruction. The subtext isn’t naive happiness; it’s an argument against narrowing life to survival or status. Gratitude, for him, isn’t denial of suffering. It’s a refusal to let suffering have the last word when the night sky is still there, waiting to be noticed.