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Thanksgiving Quotes

This page is not a collection of Thanksgiving writing. It is made from three others, gratitude, family and happiness, and sorted by quality. A handful of entries mention the holiday itself, from writers as different as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the poet John Keble, Will Carleton, Patton Oswalt and Ted Nugent.

Most of what you will see is general, and it makes good table talk, with more sentiment than usual and less irony. Glance at the flag and the source before you print one on a place card.

Random quote on Thanksgiving

Most quoted on thanksgiving:

Few have written about the joy of political life, the sense of comradeship and achievement. As activists we need to believe in vision and imagination; communicate a sense of possibility. Bleakness is not the whole story, and escape is not the only alternative. Change is possible.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)

The merry Homes of England!
Around their hearths by night,
What gladsome looks of household love
Meet in the ruddy light!
There woman’s voice flows forth in song,
Or childhood’s tale is told,
Or lips move tunefully along
Some glorious page of old.

Felicia Hemans The Homes of England (1827)

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family.... [P]ublic employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one’s family and affairs.

Thomas Jefferson

Happiness is a difficult lesson to learn; it is for mankind a totally new experience and Christ will have to teach men how to handle happiness correctly, to overcome the ancient habits of misery, and thus to know the meaning of true joy. (Chapter 5)

Alice Bailey The Reappearance of the Christ (1947)

Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The Ploughboy is whooping—anon—anon!
There's joy in the mountains:
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone.

William Wordsworth

They have a secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad, and which arises from the sense of their constant unhappiness. They have another secret instinct, a remnant of the greatness of our original nature, which teaches them that happiness in reality consists only in rest and not in stir.

Blaise Pascal

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

Aristotle

As we give thanks for the Earth, will we live in such a way that the Earth can be grateful for us? (2015)

Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.

Madeleine L'Engle The Irrational Season (1977)

If... a man had a godless father or son or brother, who became a hindrance to his faith and an obstacle to the life above, let him not live in fellowship or agreement with him, but let him dissolve the fleshly relationship on account of the spiritual antagonism.

Clement of Alexandria

If hush'd the loud whirlwind that ruffled the deep,
The sky if no longer dark tempests deform;
When our perils are past shall our gratitude sleep?
No! Here's to the pilot that weather'd the storm!

George Canning

Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. I'm not worried about my soul.

Clarence Darrow

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

Alain de Botton The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)

Pleasant feeling is impermanent, conditioned, dependently-arisen, bound to decay, to vanish, to fade away, to cease—and so too are painful feeling and neutral feeling. So anyone who, on experiencing a pleasant feeling, thinks: "This is my self", must, at the cessation of that pleasant feeling, think: "My self has gone!"

Gautama Buddha

Be it even over our bleaching bones the truth will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! Under all the severe blows of fate, I shall be happy as in the best days of my youth! Because, my friends, the highest human happiness is not the exploitation of the present but the preparation of the future.

Leon Trotsky

I have often noticed that
ancestors never boast
of the descendants who boast
of ancestors I would
rather start a family than
finish one blood will tell but often
it tells too much

Don Marquis

Thanksgiving is a time for families and friends to gather together and express gratitude for all that we have been given, the freedoms we enjoy, and the loved ones who enrich our lives. We recognize that all of these blessings, and life itself, come not from the hand of man but from Almighty God.

George W. Bush

Rejoice evermore in your Redeemer,— in His truth — His person — His almighty grace — His everlasting faithfulness — His precious blood whose efficacy reaches farther than the eye of your conscience ever penetrated, and cleanses you from a sin- fulness more inveterate than you have ever conceived to be yours.

Richard Fuller

You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

Bill Gates

If a man ... does not understand that the object of his life is progress, that God’s Will for him is that he shall grow to be something better and nobler than he is now, then also he will bring unhappiness and suffering upon himself, because he will be likely to live for the lower side of life only, and that lower side of life never finally satisfies the inner man.

Charles Webster Leadbeater

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