Dear Hope Nation,
I suspect many of you are tired of hearing me talk about gratitude. The way I go on, expressing gratitude sounds like a panacea, a remedy for everything that ails you. That, of course, is nonsense. Sharing your gratitude with the world will not fix toe fungus, halitosis or balding. (More honestly, I should say no clinical evidence exists to suggest these things. I maintain my faith in the power of gratitude, so I’m going to wait for peer-reviewed journals to weigh in on this.) Gratitude may transform your life, and will not cause any damage. Promise.
I’ve included some of my favorite quotes below in no particular order. I do have a favorite one, but I doubt anyone else will identify it. (If you text or email me your guess and it’s correct, I’ll be you a large ice cream cone. Really!) Please, please, please choose at least one and sit with it until it starts to throb with meaning.
You matter. I matter. We matter.
Best,
Keith
“Be grateful for what you already have while
you pursue your goals.
If you aren’t grateful for what you already
have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.”
? Roy T.
Bennett, The
Light in the Heart
“Pursue what catches your heart, not what
catches your eyes.”
? Roy T.
Bennett, The
Light in the Heart
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what
you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you
only hoped for.”
? Epicurus
“True forgiveness is when
you can say, “Thank you for that experience.”
? Oprah Winfrey
“Piglet noticed that even
though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of
Gratitude.”
? A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that
comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have
contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your
gratitude.”
? Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.
And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”
? Maya Angelou, Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer
“Being grateful does not
mean that everything is necessarily good. It just means that you can accept it
as a gift.”
? Roy T. Bennett
“If the only prayer you
said was thank you, that would be enough.”
? Meister Eckhart
“When we give cheerfully
and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
? Maya Angelou
“Enough is a feast.”
–Buddhist Proverb
“Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”
–Robert Brault
“My expectations were
reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.”
? Stephen W. Hawking
“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and
ambition look ahead.”
? C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
“The highest tribute to
the dead is not grief but gratitude.”
? Thornton Wilder
“In normal life we hardly
realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without
such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own
achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”
? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters
and Papers from Prison
“Not what we say about
our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.”
? W. T. Purkiser
“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
“Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.”
–Gertrude Stein