Skip to content

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:

I really am a happy, amusing fellow at heart. Trouble is I seem the only one left.

Cary Grant

Jim [Coleman, his defense attorney] and Fred [Lawrence, his minister], I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends.

Ted Bundy

For each new morning let there be flow of love. Let there be light of happiness in every direction.

Amit Ray Walking the Path of Compassion (2015)

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

Francis Bacon

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.

Buckminster Fuller Critical Path (1981)

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

J. D. Salinger Franny and Zooey (1961)

Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
they have had what they wanted

Robinson Jeffers

Learn to recognise the mother in Evil, Terror, Sorrow, Denial, as well as in Sweetness and in Joy.

Swami Vivekananda

The family was based, not upon actual relationship, but upon power, and the husband acquired over his wife the same despotic power which the father had over his children.

Henry James Sumner Maine The early history of the property of married women (1873)

The role tradition has played in the relationship in the family between men and women has been detrimental to women.

Graça Machel Graca Machel: Traditional practices put women in positions of inferiority (2009)

Excessive protection prevents maturation, thus also blocking emotional development and happiness.

Paolo Crepet

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Waiting for the miracle
There's nothing left to do.
I haven't been this happy
since the end of World War II.

Leonard Cohen The Future (1992)

Hi, new people — there's a lot of new people. Welcome to the family. We're a little weird here, but we're all very nice — so you'll fit in here. We're kind of intense — but you'll figure it out.

Ysabella Brave

We state with a unified voice that religions through which Almighty God sought to bring happiness to mankind should not be turned into instruments to cause misery

Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

If I had designed the school in cement and steel, this money would have been exported and lost for those families.

Anna Heringer The warmth and wisdom of mud buildings (2017)

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.

Steven Erikson House of Chains (2002)

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth Finding the Magnificent in Lower Mundane : Extraordinary Stories About An Ordinary Place (1994)

Related topics