Wordful Wednesday

GRATITUDE

Albert Schweitzer:
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Albert Schweitzer:
To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.

Alfred Painter:
Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :
Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buddha:
Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.

Cicero:
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Denis Waitley:
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Edward Gibbon:
Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

Eric Hoffer:
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld:
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

Frederick Turner:
To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

H. U. Westermayer:
The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.

Henry Ward Beecher:
Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

Johannes A. Gaertner:
To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.

John F. Kennedy:
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

Leroy [Satchel] Paige:
[D]on't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.
New York Post, October 4, 1959

Marc Estrin:

Kindness trumps greed: it asks for sharing. Kindness trumps fear: it calls forth gratefulness and love. Kindness trumps even stupidity, for with sharing and love, one learns.

Marcel Proust:
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Margaret Cousins:
Appreciation can make a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.

Meister Eckhart:
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.

Melodie Beattie:
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Rabindranath Tagore:
Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

The Conservative
Seneca:
There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

Thomas Erskine:
In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.

William James:
The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.