Quotes about gratitude

He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

“There’s no formula. Keep busy with your work and your life. You can’t become a professional mourner. It doesn’t help you or others. Replay the good times. Be grateful for the years you had.”

“I have no regrets at all. None. I consider myself to be the luckiest old broad on two feet.”

I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.

Like many wealthy people, it was Miss Crawley’s habit to accept as much service as she could get from her inferiors; and good-naturedly to take leave of them when she no longer found them useful. Gratitude among certain rich folks is scarcely natural or to be thought of. They take needy people’s services as their due. Nor have you, O poor parasite and humble hanger-on, much reason to complain! Your friendship for Dives is about as sincere as the return which it usually gets. It is money you love, and not the man; and were Croesus and his footman to change places, you know, you poor rogue, who would have the benefit of your allegiance.

I thought back to what Jeri told me, years ago. None of us ask to be born where we are, or how we are. The challenge of life is to make the most out of what you’ve been given. And despite all of the things I don’t have…I have been given something very important. The love of others is a gift from God, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

This is my life now. I’m grateful that I have arrived at this point. This is where I had always wanted to be; writing full-time is much more challenging than I had imagined, but I’m truly enjoying the experience and learning from it each day.

Thank you for letting me love you. Thank you for loving me back. Thank you for staying, I know it was hard sometimes. I hope you now live free.

I am a child of the American men and women who grew up in the Great Depression, who came of age in World War II and then devoted their adult years to the building of modern America- the remarkable people I wrote about in The Greatest Generation. As I walked the beaches of Normandy on the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day, I first began to fully realize how they had shaped my life. They were my parents and the parents of my friends, teachers, ministers, physicians, and hometown merchants, the men and women who showed me the way through their own exacting standards of hard work, sacrifice, and personal responsibility. I began to understand how much I owed them.

I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work?

I have lived in the best of all possible worlds; the only world, so far as we know, on which human beings can live and have their being; it has been my privilege to be a human being on the planet Earth. There is, for me, something fantastic in the idea of being here at all. Always I have felt a little incredulous of the whole business.

The earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all. And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.