Quotes About Gratitude

the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are "Help me, Help me, Help me" and "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn't what you give in exchange for something; it's what you feel when you are blessed—blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.

a book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.

My mom's discipline worked out perfectly. I wouldn't change a thing.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Wat zij mij gaf, was voldoende. Misschien waren het korstjes brood, eigenlijk voor de meeuwen bestemd; ik was er gelukkig mee, of kon doen alsof.

La falta de comodidades es fundamental para que el hombre se sienta bien consigo mismo

Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.

I am not afraid of tomorrow for I have seen yesterday and I love today

Pluck not the wayside flower; It is the traveler's dower.

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you"?

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...

We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This

Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

According to Seneca, "A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is." He therefore recommends that we "do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: 'None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!'" After all, what point is there in "being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?"21

How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.