Thanksgiving Quotes from Great Writers

Quotations from Authors and Poets Inspire and Uplift

© Tel Asiado

Nov 3, 2008

December 1620 has gone a long way since the English Puritans landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Today, countries like the United States celebrate Thanksgiving with glad reunions of family and friends, and tables graced with festive turkeys. Here are great quotes for this blessed day.

Quotes from Famous Writers on Thanksgiving Day

• "Gratitude is the sign of noble souls." - Aesop (c.620 BC-c.560 BC)

• "Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

• "Some hae meat and canna eat, - And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, Sae let the Lord be thank it." - Robert Burns (1759-1796)

• "I thank you God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of the trees and a blue dream of sky." - E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

• "For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• "Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all." - William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• "I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy." – Anne Frank (1929-1945)

• "There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American." - O. Henry (1862-1910)

• "I am Glad he thanks God for anything." – Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

• "Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving." - Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

• "O Lord that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

• "Great as the preparations were for the dinner, everything was so contrived that not a soul in the house should be kept from the morning service of Thanksgiving in the church."- Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

• "Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for – annually, not oftener – if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thanks the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments." – Mark Twain (1835-1910)

• "Ah! On Thanksgiving Day. When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before. What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?" – John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

• "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." -Thornton Wilder (1897-1975)

Readers may want to check out some of these quotes: Hope Quotes and Sayings from the Bible, Thanksgiving Quotes from the Bible and God Quotes from Book of Job.

Thanksgiving Quotes from Writers

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