Gratitude “Quotes”

Inspiration comes in many voices.  Which one speaks to you?

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.   -Meister Eckhart

A person however learned and qualified in his life’s work in whom gratitude is absent, is devoid of that beauty of character which makes personality fragrant.   -Hazrat Inayat Kahn

In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline.  The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and all I have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.  -Henri Nouwen

Clearly, one of the major obstacles to our experience of gratitude is the habit we have of sleepwalking through life.  The truth is that we are never lacking for blessings in our lives, but we are often lacking in awareness and recognition of them.   -Rev. Diane Berke, Ph.D

Spiritual leaders teach that waking up is a process, that it doesn’t just happen once and for all, but must occur again and again when we realize we have forgotten the miracle of being alive, and in recognizing our forgetfulness, we wake to the miracle once again.  In the moments we are awake to the wonder of simply being alive, gratitude flows, no matter our circumstances.   -M.J. Ryan

A thankful person is thankful under all circumstances.  A complaining soul complains even if he lives in paradise.   -Baha’u'llah

The grateful outreaching of your mind in thankful praise to the Supreme is a liberation or expenditure of force; it cannot fail to reach that to which it is addressed, and the reaction is an instantaneous movement towards you.   -Wallace Wattles.

If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.   -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

-E.E. Cummings

“There is something about the mental act of thanksgiving that seems to carry the human mind far beyond the region of doubt into the clear atmosphere of faith and trust, where “all things are possible.”

–H. Emilie Cady

From Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D.’s book, Thanks!…

When the well-being of participants int he gratitude group was compared to the control group. a strong and consistent pattern appeared: The gratitude group was still enjoying benefits six months later. They were experiencing more positive emotions, were more satisfied with their lives, felt better about their lives as a whole, and continued to feel more connected to others.  Even though the experiment they had participated in terminated nearly six months before, they maintained levels of overall well-being that were nearly 25% higher than persons in the control condition.  The evidence contradicts the widely help view that all people have a set-point of happiness that cannot be reset by any known means : in some cases, people have reported that gratitude led to transformative life changes.