Quotes About Gratitude

When you are grateful for what you have, I know you understand the magnitude of what I have lost.

It seems that gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works—it's not alive.

We need happy moments and happiness in our lives; however, I'm growing more convinced that the pursuit of happiness may get in the way of deeper, more meaningful experiences like joy and gratitude. I know, from the research and my experiences, that when it comes to parenting, what makes children happy in the moment is not always what leads them to developing deeper joy, grounded confidence, and meaningful connection.

Happiness is tied to circumstance and joyfulness is tied to spirit and gratitude.

Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness. Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love. — ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS

Get Deliberate: When I'm flooded with fear and scarcity, I try to call forward joy and sufficiency by acknowledging the fear, then transforming it into gratitude. I say this out loud: "I'm feeling vulnerable. That's okay. I'm so grateful for ____________." Doing this has absolutely increased my capacity for joy.

The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough.

The best story stewardship in these moments is just to say, "I'm grateful that you're sharing this with me. What does support look like? I can listen and be with you, I can help problem-solve, or whatever else you need. You tell me.

If the opposite of scarcity is enough, then practicing gratitude is how we acknowledge that there's enough and that we're enough.

Joy comes to us in moments—ordinary moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.

Joy and gratitude can be very vulnerable and intense experiences. We are an anxious people and many of us have very little tolerance for vulnerability. Our anxiety and fear can manifest as scarcity. We think to ourselves: I'm not going to allow myself to feel this joy because I know it won't last. Acknowledging how grateful I am is an invitation for disaster. I'd rather not be joyful than have to wait for the other shoe to drop.

Gratitude, therefore, emerged from the data as the antidote to foreboding joy. In fact, every participant who spoke about the ability to stay open to joy also talked about the importance of practicing gratitude. This pattern of association was so thoroughly prevalent in the data that I made a commitment as a researcher not to talk about joy without talking about gratitude.

Get Going: From taking turns being thankful during grace to more creative projects like creating a jar to keep gratitude notes in, we're making Wholeheartedness a family affair.

Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it's not merely benign or "too bad" if we don't use the gifts that we've been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being.

When we feel joy, it is a place of incredible vulnerability—it's beauty and fragility and deep gratitude and impermanence all wrapped up in one experience. When we can't tolerate that level of vulnerability, joy actually becomes foreboding, and we immediately move to self-protection. It's as if we grab vulnerability by the shoulders and say, "You will not catch me off guard. You will not sucker-punch me with pain. I will be prepared and ready for you.

What Is Joy? Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness. Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.

Gratitude, therefore, emerged from the data as the antidote to foreboding joy.

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark

There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. There's research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure—the list goes on.

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to one another by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and belonging.

or when I loved so fiercely that rather than feeling gratitude and joy I could only prepare for loss—I

I was also startled by the fact that research participants consistently described both joyfulness and gratitude as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human connectedness and a power greater than us.

we're a nation hungry for more joy: Because we're starving from a lack of gratitude.

Comparison is the thief of happiness." I can't tell you how many times I'm feeling so good about myself and my life and my family, and then in a split second it's gone because I consciously or unconsciously start comparing myself to other people. As