10 Great Quotes on Thanksgiving and Gratitude

10 Great Quotes on Thanksgiving and Gratitude November 26, 2015

thanks.001“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” ― G.K Chesterton

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” ― E.E. Cummings 

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” ― Meister Eckhart 

“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves–that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.” ― N.T. Wright 

“Gratitude looks to the past, and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.” ― C.S. Lewis

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us… the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.” ― Thomas Merton 

“To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind—not just in human form but also in human being.” ― Barbara Brown Taylor 

“Augustine’s profound account of the ontological significance of birth and our inability to remember our beginning means that as created beings we necessarily live out a story we have not chosen. To come to terms with our beginning requires a truthful story to acquire the skills to live in gratitude rather than resentment for the gift of life.” Stanley Hauerwas

okay…11.

“Imagine having a sacrament named “thanks”! We are on the receiving end, without accomplishment, achievement, or qualification. It is a gift, and we are grateful! That moment of gift is a peaceable alternative that many who are “weary and heavy-laden, cumbered with a load of care” receive gladly. The offer of free gift, faithful to Judaism, might let us learn enough to halt the dramatic anti-neighborliness to which our society is madly and uncritically committed.” ― Walter Brueggemann


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