I'm especially grateful that they're here at a time when the rest of Ireland is focused on the final round of the Six Nations rugby tournament and the last match of the legendary Brian O'Driscoll.
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
The people who are successful are those who are grateful for everything they have. Giving thanks for what we have always opens the door for more to come, and ungratefulness always closes the door.
I'm personally very grateful to my many friends in the Greek-American community, sons and daughters of Greece who have found success in every walk of American life.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to - better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
Deeply impressed with the blessing which we enjoy, and of which we have much manifold proofs, my mind is irresistibly drawn to that Almighty Being, the great source source from whence they proceed and whom our most grateful acknowledgements are due.
Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.
Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
But when he thought to complain about the burden of its weight, he remembered that, because he had the jacket, he had withstood the cold of the dawn. We have to be prepared for change, he thought, and he was grateful for the jacket's weight and warmth. The jacket had a purpose, and so did the boy.
I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. . . I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.
If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.