The Best Gratitude Quotes

Experiencing and expressing gratitude is an important part of any spiritual practice.  It opens the heart and activates positive emotion centers in the brain.  Regular practice of gratitude can change the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. The positive emotions we evoke can soothe distress and broaden our thinking patterns so we develop a larger and more expansive view of our lives.  Gratitude is an emotion of connectedness, which reminds us we are part of a larger universe with all living things. Below are some of my favorite quotes about gratitude to help inspire you and deepen your thinking about finding an enduring place for gratitude in your own life.  

•  "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." - Marcel Proust

• "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder

• As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. John F. Kennedy 

• At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. Albert Schweitzer 

• The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.
-- WIlliam James

• "Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough."
-- Oprah Winfrey

• •  He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has."--Epictus    
  • The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts.  No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.  ~H.U. Westermayer
  
  
  • Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.  ~G.B. Stern
  
  
  • If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.  ~Meister Eckhart
  
  
  • There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed.  If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.  ~Robert Brault.
  • Gratitude is the memory of the heart.  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu, translated from French
  
  
  • When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton
  
  
  • The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard
  
  
  • Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture.  ~Kak Sri
  
  
  • If you have lived, take thankfully the past.  ~John Dryden
  
  
  • As each day comes to us refreshed and anew, so does my gratitude renew itself daily.  The breaking of the sun over the horizon is my grateful heart dawning upon a blessed world.  ~Terri Guillemets
  
  
  • I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~G.K. Chesterton
  
  
  • You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.  ~G.K. Chesterton
  
  For each new morning with its light, 
   For rest and shelter of the night, 
  For health and food, for love and friends, 
  For everything Thy goodness sends. 
  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
  
  • If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get.  ~Frank A. Clark
  
  
  • The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!  ~Henry Ward Beecher
  
  
  • Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal.  It's a way to live.  ~Attributed to Jacqueline Winspear
  
  
  • Praise the bridge that carried you over.  ~George Colman
  
  
  • If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.  ~Robert Quillen
  
  
  • He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.  ~Epictetus
  
  
  • What a miserable thing life is:  you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.  ~Bertolt Brecht, Jungle of Cities, 1924
  
  
  • Gratitude is the best attitude.  ~Author Unknown
  
  
  • Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.  ~W.T. Purkiser
  
  
  • We thank Thee, O Father of all, for... all the soul-help that sad souls understand.  ~Will Carleton
  
  
  • We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  ~Thornton Wilder
  
  
  
  • Two kinds of gratitude:  The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.  ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
  
  
  • Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.  ~William Faulkner
  
  
  • If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness.  It will change your life mightily.  ~Gerald Good
  
  
  • Gratitude is the least of the virtues, but ingratitude is the worst of vices.  ~Thomas Fuller
  
  
  • Gratitude is an opener of locked-up blessings.  ~Marianne Williamson
  
  
  • There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude.  It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance.  ~Joseph Addison
  
  
  • Gratitude is the music of the heart, when its chords are swept by the breeze of kindness.  ~Author Unknown
  
  
  • I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.  ~Benjamin Disraeli
  
  
  • There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.  ~R.H. Blyth
  
  
  • Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.  ~Henry Clay
  
  
  • The world has enough beautiful mountains and meadows, spectacular skies and serene lakes.  It has enough lush forests, flowered fields and sandy beaches.  It has plenty of stars and the promise of a new sunrise and sunset every day.  What the world needs more of is people to appreciate and enjoy it.  ~Michael Josephson
  • Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.  ~Estonian Proverb
  
  
  • All that we behold is full of blessings.  ~William Wordsworth
  
  
  Thou hast given so much to me,
  Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;
  Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
  As if Thy blessings had spare days,
  • But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.~George Herbert
  • The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition
  
  
  • Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.  ~Henry Ward Beecher
  
  
  • When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?  ~George Canning
  
  
  • As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy
  
  
  • We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  ~Cynthia Ozick
  
  
  • Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.  ~Horace
  
  
  • The grateful person, being still the most severe exacter of himself, not only confesses, but proclaims, his debts.  ~Robert South
  
  
  • Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
  
  
  • Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.  ~Aldous Huxley
  
  
  • When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.  ~Chinese Proverb
  
  
  • Thanks are justly due for boons unbought.  ~Ovid
  
  
  • In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.  ~H.L. Mencken
  
  
  • Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William Arthur Ward
  
  
  • Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.  ~Author Unknown