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gratitude 2
- gratitude
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Gratitude
is the sign
of noble souls.
Aesop |
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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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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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Sometimes
we forget to be grateful until we survive a trauma.
For example,
after having the flu when you ache all over, throw up for hours, and
have
little people pounding in your head with hammers, it is sheer bliss just
to eat a
piece of toast, walk outside without getting dizzy, and breathe fresh
air. Part of the journey toward joy involves not waiting around for trouble,
but being continuously aware of our blessings.
Charlotte
Davis Kasl
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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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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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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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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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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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Our indebtedness . . . is not virtue;
our repayment is.
Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the
job of gratitude.
Ruth
Benedict
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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 helps you grow and expand;
gratitude brings joy and
laughter into your
life and into
the lives of those around you.
Eileen Caddy
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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 2 - gratitude
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Gratitude
is the heart's memory.
French
Proverb
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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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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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A thankful heart is not only the greatest
virtue,
but the parent of all other virtues.
Cicero
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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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You have 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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For today and its blessings, I owe the world an
attitude of gratitude.
Clarence E. Hodges
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Be grateful
for what you have,
not regretful for what you haven't.
unattributed
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A grateful mind
is a great mind which
eventually attracts to itself great things.
Plato
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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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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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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
the window.
Louis Bromfield
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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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Gratitude consists
of 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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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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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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Some people always sigh in
thanking God.
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
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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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gratitude 2 - gratitude
3
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We return thanks to our mother, the
earth, which sustains us. We return
thanks to the rivers and streams, which supply us with water. We
return
thanks to all herbs, which furnish medicines for the cure of our
diseases.
We return thanks to the corn, and to her sisters, the beans and
squashes,
which give us life. We return thanks to the bushes and trees,
which provide
us with fruit. We return thanks to the wind, which, moving the
air, has
banished diseases. We return thanks to the moon and stars, which
have
given to us their light when the sun was gone. We return thanks to
our
grandfather He-No, that he has protected his grandchildren from witches
and reptiles, and has given to us his rain. We return thanks to
the sun, that
he has looked upon the earth with a beneficent eye. Lastly, we
return thanks
to the Great Spirit, in whom is embodied all goodness, and who directs
all
things for the good of his children.
Iroquois Prayer
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A single grateful thought toward heaven is
the most complete prayer.
Gotthold Lessing
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quotations
- contents
-
welcome
page
-
obstacles
the
people behind the words
-
our
current e-zine
-
articles
and excerpts
Daily
Meditations, Year One - Year
Two - Year Three
- Year Four
Sign up
for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign
up for your free daily meditation
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Gratitude is the
state of mind of thankfulness. As it is cultivated, we
experience an increase in our "sympathetic joy," our happiness
at another's
happiness. Just as in the cultivation of compassion, we may feel
the pain of
others, so we may begin to feel their joy as well. And it doesn't
stop there.
We begin to feel a growing sense of gratitude for whatever happiness,
great or small, that comes to those around us. Practicing
gratitude increases
our appreciation for life. It brings balance to those parts of the
self that
have cultivated attachment to our suffering, causing us to feel
victimized
by life, making God's imagined dial tone all too appealing.
Stephen Levine
A
Year to Live
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When I
think back upon my early days I am stirred by the thought of the number
of people whom I have to thank for what they gave me or for what they
were to
me. At the same time I am haunted by an oppressive consciousness
of the little
gratitude I really showed them while I was young. How many of them
have said
farewell to life without my having made clear to them what it meant to
me to
receive from them so much kindness or so much care! Many a time
have I,
with a feeling of shame, said quietly to myself over a grave the words
which
my mouth ought to have spoken to the departed, while they were still in
the flesh.
Albert Schweitzer
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