Quotes on Gratitude

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

Learn to be pleased with everything...because it could always be worse, but isn't!

You'll never meet a happy ungrateful person, or an unhappy grateful person because gratitude and happiness go together. Sometimes happiness precedes gratitude but often gratitude precedes happiness. The latter is achieved by realising things could be worse but aren't and so feeling relieved, grateful and happy.

In order to be happy we must first possess inner contentment; and inner contentment doesn't come from having all we want; but rather from wanting and appreciating being grateful for all we have.

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it - either gratefully better than or bitterly worse than something else that you alone choose.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them in particular caused by what we compare it to: something worse and we feel grateful for what we have; something better and we feel somehow let down.

People only see what they are prepared to see. If you look for what is good and what you can be grateful for you will find it everywhere.

The fault finder will find faults even in paradise and thereby miss the joys that recognition of the positives bring.

The power to become habituated to his surroundings and therefore to no longer be grateful for what is good in it is a marked characteristic of mankind and needs to be fought against if a person is to be happy.

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it. To see it a person only needs to imagine how it could be worse.

When your real, effortless, joyful grateful nature is realized, it will not be inconsistent with the ordinary activities of life.

If all men were to bring their miseries together in one place, most would be glad to take each his own home again rather than take a portion out of the common stock.

...Be grateful for what you have to be thankful for instead of complaining about the little things that annoy you.

Perhaps when the light of heaven shows us clearly the pitfalls and dangers of the earth road that led to the heavenly city, our sweetest songs of gratitude will be not for the troubles we have conquered, but for those we have escaped.

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. [and therefore the solution is to fix the jaundiced eye.]

The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.

No man is disturbed by things, but by his opinion about things.

With so many thousand joys, is it not black ingratitude to call the world a place of sorrow and torment?

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. [The ability to focus on positives and distract your mind from negatives for at least a time is a necessary skill for being happy.]

True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.