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.

I don't hate you, although, I should. But I don't. But I am grateful for what you did. It made me stronger. Healthier. Happier. It made me appreciate the people who are still here. Thank you. Because of you, I know the difference between what I deserve and what I don't. Between what I want and what I don't need. Between who to love and who to let go.

We don't practise generosity in order to secure gratitude, nor do we invest our gifts in the hope of a favourable return. Rather, it is nature that inclines us towards generosity. Just so, we don't seek friendship with an expectation of gain, but regard the feeling of love as its own reward.

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 keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn't have selected ourselves. The worlds we are born into, the people we are related to, the landscapes we learn to love wherever we are.

Be Grateful to the Man you help, think of Him as God. Is it not a great privilege to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow men?

Here's the gift of gratitude: In order to feel it, your ego has to take a backseat. What shows up in its place is greater compassion and understanding. Instead of being frustrated, you choose appreciation. And the more grateful you become , the more you have to be grateful for.

Being grateful does not mean that everything is necessarily good. It just means that you can accept it as a gift.

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

if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.

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.

Gratitude is the general feeling. It iterates the message that we should truly assert ourselves in spaces that we desire. We should be unafraid to go boldly in the direction of our dreams.

Gratitude is more of a compliment to yourself than someone else.

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.