Gratitude Quotes: For Kids, Parents, Employees, & More

By Kelsey Schultz, Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Gratitude is a powerful practice that can have remarkable benefits for our well-being. Keep reading for more on gratitude and quotes that will inspire you to live thankfully.
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Noticing the comfort of a warm breeze on a cool day, pausing to appreciate the fragrance of jasmine blooming on the vine, telling someone you love them, and thanking a friend for their thoughtful advice are all examples of gratitude. Gratitude is essentially noticing and appreciating the good in our lives. 
It’s been defined as “the willingness to recognize the unearned increments of value in one's experience” (Bertocci & Millard, 1963, p. 389). Research has shown that getting good at gratitude can precipitate staggering improvements in many aspects of our lives. For example, Emmons & McCullough (2003) showed that people who listed their blessings every week for 10 weeks experienced greater feelings of connection with others and were more satisfied with their life as a whole than people who only listed events or hassles. Other scientifically supported effects of gratitude include:  

  • Improved health (Hill & McCullough, 2003)
  • Protection against depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (Van Dusen et al., 2015)
  • Better quality of sleep (Wood et al., 2009)
  • Enhanced self-perception (Geraghty et al., 2010a)
  • Being nicer (DeWal et al., 2012)
 
Keeping a consistent gratitude practice can be challenging. It’s all too easy to focus on our worries, fears, and disappointments. In times when we are struggling to recognize the value of gratitude or to find something to appreciate, the thoughts and reflections on gratitude of other people can help provide a richer perspective and reignite our motivation to live gratefully. Here is a collection of quotes on gratitude to refer to whenever you need them.​

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Short Gratitude Quotes

  • “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” – Eckhart Tolle
  • “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "Gratitude and kindness exemplify an exceptional life." – Art Rios
  • "So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratefulness that makes us happy." – David Steindl-Rast
  • “Gratitude makes sense of your past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beattie
  • “The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become.” – Robert Holden
  • "She could go on asking herself why roses had thorns or she could be thankful that thorns had roses." – Ella Griffin

Funny Gratitude Quotes

  • “Gratitude is wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk” – Rumi
  • “I feel a very unusual sensation – if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.” – Benjamin Disraeli
  • “I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.” – Woody Allen
  • “Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” – William Faulkner

"Gratitude Is" Quotes

  • "Gratitude is a posture of your heart. I believe that it has been a gatekeeper in my life and has brought on so many blessings." – Amanda Kloots 
  • "Gratitude to me is the quality of being thankful, and the readiness to show kindness and appreciation to those around you." – Miranda Kerr
  • "Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion." – Mindy Kaling
  • "Gratitude is the power to connect with the cosmos and harness its energy." – Sukant Ratnakar
  • “Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.” – John Ortberg
  • “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” – Cicero
  • “Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever.” – Charlotte Bronte

Gratitude for Life Quotes

  • “Be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” – Carl Sagan
  • "Life is strange, beautiful, and terrifying…and I am thankful for every minute of it that I have had. I am thankful for every minute yet to come." – Benjamin W. Bass
  • "Gratitude helps you to grow and expand; gratitude brings joy and laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you." – Eileen Caddy 
  • "In the modern world, we are surrounded by so much abundance that we cannot see it." – Chris Matakas
  • “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” – Oliver Sacks
  • “Reflect on your present blessings, on which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” – Charles Dickens

Gratitude Quotes for Employees

  • “Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” – William Arthur Ward
  • "Gratitude can transform any situation. It alters your vibration, moving you from negative energy to positive. It's the quickest, easiest, most powerful way to effect change in your life—this I know for sure." – Oprah Winfrey
  • “Gratitude unlocks all that’s blocking us from really feeling truthful, really feeling authentic and vulnerable and happy.” – Gabrielle Bernstein
  • “May the work of your hands be a sign of gratitude and reverence to the human condition.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Gratitude Quotes for Students

  • "My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean." – Anne Lamott
  • "By practicing gratitude, we can actually wire our brains to help us build resilience." – Christina Costa
  • “Gratitude doesn’t change the scenery. It merely washes clean the glass you look through so you can see the colours.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
  • "There are so many things in the world that could be invisible to the material eye, and when you take a moment to stop, to pause, to be present and notice them—that’s gratitude." – Jay Shetty
  • “Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.” – GZA​

Gratitude Quotes for Friends

  • “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” – Melody Beattie
  • “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
  • “Life has no blessing like a prudent friend.” – Euripides
  • “… but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.” – Ann Druyan

Gratitude Quotes for Nurses

  • “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.” – Cynthia Ozick
  • "Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” – Maya Angelou
  • "My body is a garden rooted in gratitude. Thank you is the biggest poem I’ve got inside of me." – Sabrina Benaim
  • “Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” – Zig Ziglar

Gratitude Quotes for Family

  • “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” —Marcel Proust
  • “I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.” ― Walt Whitman
  • “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • “If you fail to carry around with you a heart of gratitude for the love you’ve been so freely given, it is easy for you not to love others as you should.” – Paul David Tripp​

Gratitude Quotes for Teachers

  • “No one who achieves success does so without the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.” – Alfred North Whitehead
  • “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.” – Carl Jung
  • “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.” – Eric Hoffer
  • “Appreciation is a wonderful thing.  It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” – Voltaire

Gratitude Quotes for Parents

  • “Demonstrate gratitude for the simple things in life. Show your child that you are a person who is truly grateful for the simple, good things in life: a sunset, rain, insects, birds, children laughing, or a kind gesture… Appreciative people are happy; they see the beauty in life while others miss it.” – Richard Carlson
  • "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love—then make that day count!" – Steve Maraboli
  • "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." – Robert Brault
  • “Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.” – Wayne Dyer​

Gratitude Quotes for Kids

  • “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” – Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
  • “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” – Mary Davis
  • “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.” – Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
  • “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” – William Arthur Ward
  • “When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” – Maya Angelou

Gratitude Quotes from Brene Brown

  • “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.”
  • “We're a nation hungry for more joy: Because we're starving from a lack of gratitude.”
  • “Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments - often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we're too busy chasing down the extraordinary moments. Other times we're so afraid of the dark we don't dare let ourselves enjoy the light. A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable. I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude and inspiration.”
  • “To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”
  • “I don't have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness - it's right in front of me if I'm paying attention and practicing gratitude.”
  • “Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy and gratitude into our lives.”

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Final Thoughts on Gratitude Quotes

Practicing gratitude can help us live more meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable lives. The opportunities to find something to be grateful for are limitless when we are open and observant. It’s important to note that practicing gratitude doesn’t imply ignoring the painful parts of your life. Rather, gratitude entails recognizing that life can be both awful and beautiful at the same time. Holding both truths is challenging, but it is possible. And with practice, it will begin to come naturally. As we are attempting to navigate life gratefully, it can be useful to refer to reflections on gratitude when we need inspiration. For more gratitude quotes, you can check out this video:

Video: Be Grateful Today – Inspirational Gratitude Quotes

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