QUOTATION: Gratitude

Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.

--Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Be Grateful for God's Gifts to Us

If we have any natural defect either in mind or body, a bad memory, slowness of apprehension, mean abilities, a crippled limb, or weak health, let us not therefore make lamentation. What were our desserts, and what obligation had God to bestow upon us a mind more richly endowed, or a body more perfectly framed? Could he not have created us mere brute animals? Or have left us in our own nothingness? Who is there that ever receives a gift and tries to make bargains about it? Let us, then, return him thanks for what, through a pure act of his goodness, he has bestowed upon us; and let us rest content with the manner in which he has treated us.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Way of Salvation and Perfection