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Gratitude
is the sign
of noble souls.
Aesop |
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gratitude 2 - gratitude
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A single grateful thought toward heaven is
the most complete prayer.
Gotthold Lessing
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Blessings we enjoy
daily, and for most of them, because they be so common,
we forget to pay
our praises. But let not us, because
it is a sacrifice so pleasing
to Him who still protects
us, and gives us flowers and showers and meat and content.
Izaak
Walton |
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Thou
that has given so much to me,
Give one thing more--a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleases me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days;
But such a heart, whose pulse may be
Thy praise.
George Herbert |
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In ordinary life we
hardly realize
that we receive a great deal more
than we
give,
and that it is
only with gratitude that life
becomes rich. It is very
easy to overestimate the
importance of our own
achievements
in comparison
with
what we owe others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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| Ruth
Benedict
Our indebtedness . . . is not virtue;
our repayment is.
Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the
job of gratitude. |
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Gratitude consist in a watchful,
minute attention to the particulars of our state,
and to
the multitudes of God's gifts, taken one by one. It fills
us with
a consciousness that God loves and cares for us,
even to the least event
and smallest need of life. It is
a blessed thought that from our childhood
God has been
laying his fatherly hands upon us, and always in
benediction,
and that even the strokes of his hands are
blessings,
and among the chiefest we have ever received.
Henry Edward Manning |
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Some people always sigh in
thanking God.
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning |
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The
art of thanksgiving is thanksliving. It is gratitude in
action. It is applying Albert Schweitzer's philosophy:
"In gratitude for your own good fortune you must
render in return some sacrifice of your life for other
life."
It is thanking God for the gift of life by living it
triumphantly.
It is thanking God for your talents and abilities by
accepting them as obligations to be invested for the
common good.
It is thanking God for all that men and women have done
for you by doing things for others.
It is thanking God for opportunities by accepting them as
a challenge to achievement.
It is thanking God for happiness by striving to make
others happy.
It is thanking God for beauty by helping to make the
world more beautiful.
It is thanking God for inspiration by trying to be an
inspiration for others.
It is thanking God for health and strength by the care
and reverence you show your body.
It is thanking God for the creative ideas that enrich
life by adding your own creative contributions to human
progress.
It is thanking God for each new day by living it to the
fullest.
It is thanking God by giving hands, arms, legs, and voice
to your thankful spirit.
It is adding to your prayers of thanksgiving, acts of thanksliving.
Wilferd
A. Peterson |
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Whatever
we are waiting for--peace of mind, contentment, grace,
the inner awareness of simple abundance--it will surely
come to us,
but only when we are ready to receive it with
an open and grateful heart.
Sarah Ban Breathnach |
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Gratitude unlocks the
fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough, and
more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos
to order,
confusion to clarity. It can turn
a meal into a feast, a
house into a home,
a stranger into a friend. Gratitude
makes
sense of our past, brings peace for today,
and
creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie |
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Gratitude helps you grow and expand;
gratitude brings joy and laughter into your life and into
the lives of those around you.
Eileen Caddy |
Love wholeheartedly, be surprised,
give
thanks and praise--then you will
discover the fullness of
your life.
David Steindl-Rast |
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Let
us be grateful to people who make us happy--
they are the
charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel
Proust |
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Gratitude
is the heart's memory.
French
Proverb |
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| Louis Bromfield
Oh, Lord, I thank you
for the privilege and gift of living in a world filled
with beauty and excitement and variety.
I thank you for the gift of loving and being
loved, for the friendliness
and understanding and beauty
of the animals on the farm and in the forest
and marshes,
for the green of the trees, the sound of the waterfall,
the darting beauty of the trout in the brook.
I thank you for the delights of music and
children, of other people's thoughts
and conversation and
their books to read by the fireside or in bed
with the
rain falling on the roof or the snow blowing past outside
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It was
inevitable, I suppose, that in the garden I should begin,
at long last,
to ask myself what lay behind all this
beauty. When guests were gone and
I had the flowers all
to myself, I was so happy that I wondered why
at the same
time I was haunted by a sense of emptiness. It was
as
though I wanted to thank somebody, but had nobody to
thank;
which is another way of saying that I felt the
need for worship. That is,
perhaps, the kindliest way in
which a person may come to his or her God.
There is an interminable
literature on the origins of the religious impulse,
but
to me it is simpler than that. It is summed up in the
image of a person
at sundown, watching the crimson flowering
of the sky
and saying--to somebody--"Thank you."
Beverly
Nichols |
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A thankful heart is not only the greatest
virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.
Cicero |
We who
receive a benefit with
gratitude repay the first installment on our debts.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca |
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The
private and personal blessings we enjoy--
the blessings of
immunity, safeguard, liberty and integrity--
deserve the
thanksgiving of a whole life.
Jeremy Taylor |
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God gave you a gift of 86,400
seconds today.
Have you used one of them to say "thank
you"?
William A. Ward |
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Joy is the simplest form of
gratitude.
Karl Barth |
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Be grateful
for what you have,
not regretful for what you haven't.
anonymous
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A grateful mind
is a great mind which
eventually attracts to itself great things.
Plato |
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There
is no closer bond than the one that gratefulness celebrates,
the bond between giver and thanksgiver.
Everything is a gift.
Grateful living is a celebration of the universal give-and-take
of life,
a limitless yes to belonging.
Can our world survive without gratefulness?
Whatever the answer, one thing is certain:
to say an unconditional yes
to the mutual belonging of all beings will make this a more joyful
world.
This is the reason why Yes is my favorite synonym for God.
David Steindl-Rast
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I would maintain that thanks
are the highest form of thought;
and that gratitude is happiness doubled
by wonder.
G.K.
Chesterton
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We can be
thankful to a friend for a few acres or a little money;
and yet for
the freedom and command of the whole earth,
and for the great
benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason,
we look upon
ourselves as under no obligation.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca |
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When awareness of
everything you have dawns in you,
how do you feel? Don't you have an extraordinary abundance
to be thankful for? Gratitude is being thankful, grateful for
what you have. With gratitude firmly rooted in your heart,
you are humble and open and receptive and inducing your Benefactor
to shower you with more gifts, physical and spiritual. And it's
more
than gifts! A grateful heart is a grace-full heart. A
grace-full heart
is one that is open, alive, and growing toward communion with its
Benefactor.
Do you realize that you have been given exactly what you
need
just so that you may proceed with the spiritual lessons and growth
that you, you alone, need to master? Yes, life can be absolutely
daunting,
but you can have gratitude when you realize that you have just what you
need.
Gratitude is the virtue that shifts our energy in order to facilitate
our great
growth to the next levels. Without the hankering after what we
don't have,
we allow ourselves to receive from God just what we need. Then we
have
and use just what we need to, so that we're prepared for greater gifts
and gains inside.
Michael Goddart
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A
bag of apples, a pot of homemade jam, a scribbled note,
a bunch of golden flowers, a coloured pebble, a box of seedlings,
an empty scent bottle for the children. . . . Who needs
diamonds and van-delivered bouquets?
Pam Brown
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If
your gratitude depends on what life gives you or what other people
do for you or to you, you will be disappointed more often than you are
grateful.
But you can learn to feel grateful by rethinking your attitude
towards life.
First, remember that contentment lies in giving.
If you know that giving
is better than receiving, then you can feel grateful for what you are
able
to give others.
This does not mean you ignore your own needs.
You will
decide what to give and how to give it, and then at the end of the day
you will be grateful for having had the chance to give in your own way.
Remember, we all have something to give, and our ability to give is
not related to our finances or physical strength.
Bernie Siegel
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For today and its blessings, I owe the world an
attitude of gratitude.
Clarence E. Hodges
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I
move through my day-to-day life with a sense of appreciation and
gratitude that comes from knowing how fortunate I truly am and
how unearned all that I am thankful for really is.
To have this perspective in my everyday consciousness is
in itself a gift, for it leads to feeling “graced,” or
blessed, each time. . . . Every time I see beauty around me I
appreciate what I am seeing, and simultaneously I have this
sense of appreciation—for being alive to have this particular
moment.
Jean Shinoda Bolen |
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I'm
trying to develop an attitude that reflects gratitude
for everything. It's a strange concept, I know, because
what happens when I get sick? Am I supposed to be thankful
for the sickness? Well, when I think about it, I can be thankful
that my body's immune system fights off the invading germs
or virus. I can be thankful for the time I have to recover, and
the people who have spent so much time and energy doing
research and development so that there are medicines that
will help my body. There was a time when pneumonia was
often fatal, yet in our era we have antibiotics that kill it before
it can kill us. And there are still some countries where people
don't have ready access to those medicines. So while I may
not be thankful for the sickness, I can be thankful in
sickness.
tom
walsh
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When you cultivate gratitude, you become a happier,
more fulfilled person. The more you're grateful
for, the more blessings will come to you.
Susan Santucci
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