Like humility, generosity comes from seeing that everything we have and everything we accomplish comes from God’s grace and God’s love for us… Certainly it is from experiencing this generosity of God and the generosity of those in our life that we learn gratitude and to be generous to others. - God Has a Dream, p. 86.

Some people are gift givers by nature. They love their tribe, or they respect their art, and so they give. Not for an ulterior motive, but because it gives them joy.

Let us forget all that we are taught about how it is noble to give and humiliating to receive. Because for most people, generosity consists only in giving, but receiving is also an act of love. Allowing someone else to make us happy will make them happy too.

Generosity brings happiness at every stage of its expression. We experience joy in forming the intention to be generous. We experience joy in the actual act of giving something. And we experience joy in remembering the fact that we have given.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

I’ve heard it said that sometimes, in return for the gifts of the earth, gratitude is enough. It is our uniquely human gift to express thanks, because we have the awareness and the collective memory to remember that the world could well be otherwise, less generous than it is. But I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.

I don’t feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness.

Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike.

Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. You reciprocate a favor by paying it back. You honor an act of kindness by paying it forward.

In all things we should try to make ourselves be as grateful as possible. For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves, in a manner in which justice, commonly held to belong to others, is not. Gratitude pays itself back in large measure.

This is the true nature of gratitude. Time gnaws and diminishes all things, but it increases and adds to our good deeds: anytime we have extended a generous hand to a rational human being, that goodness keeps growing and glowing in the man's heart, forever remembered, constantly contemplated.

Generosity is to help a deserving person without his request, and if you help him after his request, then it is either out of self-respect or to avoid rebuke.

Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so.

Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris