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.
Their sacrifice was great, but not in vain. All Americans and every free nation on earth can trace their liberty to the white markers of places like Arlington National Cemetery. And may God keep us ever grateful.
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.
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.
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise for which we are later, in the fullness of time and understanding, very grateful for!
I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.
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.
An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous in such a high-wrought felicity; and she went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment.