Quotes About Appreciation

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.

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.

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

There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

When, as the result of being exposed to luxurious living, people become hard to please, a curious thing happens. Rather than mourning the loss of their ability to enjoy simple things, they take pride in their newly gained inability to enjoy anything but "the best.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.

Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy. T

This might sound a bit silly, but to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place. To such a person, glasses are amazing; to everyone else, a glass is just a glass, and it is half empty to boot.

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

People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything, but against something.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that thankfulness is indeed a virtue.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Never denigrate the past. Many managers, in their enthusiasm for a future that is going to be better than the past, ridicule or demean the old way of doing things. In doing so they consolidate the resistance against the transition because people identify with the way things used to be and thus feel that their self-worth is at stake whenever the past is attacked.

I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that's counted truly counts.

How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power? How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it? Science says that an acre of soil produces one horsepower every day. But you could pour gasoline all over the ground forever and never see it sprout maple trees.

No man has ever lived that had enoughOf children's gratitude or woman's love.

THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness, speak cheering words while their ears can hear, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them.

There is in true beauty, as in courage, something which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.