120 Thanksgiving Quotes to Inspire Gratitude, Laughter, and Full Bellies

It's hard for us to choose what we love most about Thanksgiving. Maybe it's the mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, roast turkey, or stuffing, or pumpkin pie, or the triple helping of football, or the parade... There's so much to love about the holiday, but the one thing we always come back to is the gratitude.

It has long been a tradition to express gratitude around the Thanksgiving table, but there's more to it than just saying "thank you." Research shows that practicing gratitude is consistently and strongly associated with greater happiness (as is an extra piece of that pumpkin pie!).

"Gratitude" is derived from the Latin word gratia, which translates to gratefulness, grace, or graciousness, depending on the context. Practicing gratitude is an all-encompassing act that shows appreciation for everything a person receives or experiences. Gratitude helps people improve their health, feel more positive emotions, bask in good experiences, handle adversity more smoothly, and build strong relationships.

The tradition of gratitude will lift the spirits of people from all walks of life and it doesn't — and shouldn't — stop at Thanksgiving. To get the turkey wings flapping, we've compiled some of our favorite Thanksgiving quotes that will inspire you to count your blessings, and maybe even make you laugh. And to be grateful for a certain kind of pie...

Thanksgiving quotes

• “Thanksgiving Day is a good day to recommit our energies to giving thanks and just giving." – Amy Grant
• “Not what we say about our blessings but how we use them is the true measure of Thanksgiving." – W. T. Purkiser
• “I love Thanksgiving because it's a holiday that is centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me." – Marcus Samuelsson
• “I am happy because I am grateful. I choose to be grateful. That gratitude allows me to be happy." – Will Arnett
• “We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have." – Frederick Koenig
• “Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind." – Lionel Hampton
• “Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often." – Johnny Carson
• “Always have an attitude of gratitude." – Sterling K. Brown
• “Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life" – Rumi
• “Good mashed potato is one of the great luxuries of life." – Lindsey Bareham
• “The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Is there anything else we all can agree so vehemently about? I don't think so." – Nora Ephron
• “If there's one thing I've learned over thee eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it." – Rick Riordan
• "Thanksgiving is the meal we aspire for other meals to resemble." – Jonathan Safran Foer
• “For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile." – Elie Wiesel

• "Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other." – Randy Pausch
• "Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse." – Henry Van Dyke
• "Thanksgiving was never meant to be shut up in a single day." – Robert Caspar Lintner
• "If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily." – Gerald Good
• "He who thanks but with the lips thanks but in part; the full, the true Thanksgiving comes from the heart." – J.A. Shedd
• "Give thanks not just on Thanksgiving Day but every day of your life. Appreciate and never take for granted all that you have." – Catherine Pulsifer
• "Appreciation can change a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary." – Margaret Cousins
• "There is always, always something to be thankful for." – Rhonda Bryne
• "No one has ever become poor by giving." – Anne Frank
• "We must find the time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives." – John F. Kennedy
• "Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." – Charles Dickens
• “Thanksgiving is a joyous invitation to shower the world with love and gratitude." – Amy Leigh Mercree
• “The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for." – Norman Vincent Peale
• “When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around." – Willie Nelson
• “What if, today, we were just grateful for everything?" – Charlie Brown
• "The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest." – William Blake
• “I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual." – Henry David Thoreau
• "Thanksgiving isn't just a day. It's a way we can live our lives every day." – Katrina Mayer
• "We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count." – Neal A. Maxell
• "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough." – Meister Eckhart
• "I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage." – Erma Bombeck
• "I can't cook a Thanksgiving dinner. All I can make is cold cereal and maybe toast." – Charlie Brown
• "Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year." – P.J. O'Rourke
• "A new survey found that 80% of men claim they help cook Thanksgiving dinner. Which makes sense, when you hear them consider saying 'That smells good' to be helping." – Jimmy Fallon
• "The Thanksgiving tradition is, we overeat. 'Hey, how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?' 'But we do that every day!' 'Oh. What if we eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us.'" – Jim Gaffigan
• "For those of you who cannot be with family this Thanksgiving, please resist the urge to brag." – Andy Borowitz
• "There are only two ways to live your live. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other as is though everything is a miracle." – Albert Einstein
• "The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become." – Robert Holden
• "Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance." – Eckhart Tolle
• "Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast." – William Shakespeare
• "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." – William Arthur Ward
• "Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds." – Theodore Roosevelt
• "Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out." – John Wooden
• "Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all." – William Faulkner
• "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." – Marcel Proust
• "Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." – Ernest Hemingway
• "If you stand in the meat section at the grocery store long enough, you start to get mad at turkeys. There's turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Someone needs to tell the turkey, 'Man, just be yourself.'" – Mitch Hedberg
• "The Thankstini: A fun and delicious new novelty drink I invented. Cranberry juice, potato vodka, and a bouillon cube. Tastes just like a turkey dinner." – Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother
• "It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without a little emotional scarring." – Friends
• "It's not too much food. This is what we've been training for our whole lives. This is our destiny; this is our finest hour." – Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls
• "Overeating at Thanksgiving is a case in point. It's a national tradition." – Eric Samuel Timm, Static Jedi: The Art of Hearing God Through the Noise

• "Coexistence: What the farmer does with the turkey — until Thanksgiving." – Mike Connolly
• "I suppose I will die never knowing what pumpkin pie tastes like when you have room for it." – Robert Brault
• "An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day." – Irv Kupcinet
• "I'm looking forward to seeing pie this Thanksgiving more than members of my own family." – Damien Fahey
• "Thanksgiving is America's national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty." – Michael Dresser
• “I like football. I find it's an exciting strategic game. It's a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving." – Craig Ferguson
• “Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie." – Jim Davis
• “If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it's really like making a large chicken" – Ina Garten
• “But see, in our open clearings, how golden the melons lie; enrich them with sweets and spices, and give us the pumpkin-pie!" – Margaret Junkin Preston
• “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow." – Melody Beattie
• “It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it." – Alistair Cooke
• "Cooking tip: Wrap turkey leftovers in aluminum foil and throw them out." – Nicole Hollander
• “Thanksgiving Day, man — not a good day to be my pants." – Kevin James
• “Pie makes everybody happy." – Laurie Halse Anderson
• “Thanksgiving: Bringing out the best in family dysfunction since 1863." – Unknown
• “Thanksgiving — when the people who are the most thankful are the ones who didn't have to cook." – Melanie White
• “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations." – Oscar Wilde

• “Thanksgiving is a lot like Christmas, except you don't get any presents for holding in your familial rage." – Unknown
• “People who love to eat are always the best people." – Julia Child
• "Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough." – Oprah Winfrey
• “What I love about Thanksgiving is that it's purely about getting together with friends or family and enjoying food. It's really for everybody, and it doesn't matter where you're from." – Daniel Humm
• “The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness" – Dalai Lama
• “I celebrated Thanksgiving the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land." – Jon Stewart
• “I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online." – Kumail Nanjiani
• “It took me three weeks to stuff the turkey. I stuffed it through the beak." – Phyllis Diller
• “Thanksgiving is a time to count your blessings, one by one, as each relative goes home." –Melanie White
• “At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough." – Toni Morrison
• “Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses." – Alphonse Karr
• “Gratitude opens the door, the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude." – Deepak Chopra
• “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices." – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “The thankful heart opens our eyes to a multitude of blessings that continually surround us." – James E. Faust
• “Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother's tasted better the day before."– Rita Rudner
• “We're having something different this year for Thanksgiving. Instead of a turkey, we're having a swan. You get more stuffing." – George Carlin
• “Even though we're a week and a half away from Thanksgiving, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." – Richard Roeper
• “You can tell you ate too much for Thanksgiving when you have to let your bathrobe out."– Jay Leno
• “You can't have Thanksgiving without turkey. That's like Fourth of July without apple pie, or Friday with no two pizzas." – Joey Tribbiani, Friends
• “Archeologists 10,000 years from now will believe this was a sacred feast where gravy boats were worshipped." – Just Bill
• “An attitude of gratitude goes a long way when it comes to physical and emotional healing." – Jill Bolte Taylor
• “Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion." – Mindy Kaling
• “Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation." – John Ortberg
• “Even in the trials of life, if we have eyes to see them, we can find good things everywhere we look." – Joanna Gaines
• “I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." – Voltaire
• “When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself." – Tecumseh
• “Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever." – Charlotte Bronte
• “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." – Epictetus
• “The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time." – Douglas Wood
• “We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not." – Audre Lorde
• “The older you get, the more fragile you understand life to be. I think that's good motivation for getting out of bed joyfully each day." – Julia Roberts
• “Be consistent in your dedication to showing your gratitude to others. Gratitude is a fuel, a medicine, and spiritual, and emotional nourishment." – Steve Maraboli
• “If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share." – W. Clement Stone
• “You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving." – Amy Carmichael
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return." – Ralph Marston
• “At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings." – J. Robert Moskin
• "Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter what befalls us in life, we can take the charred remnants and we can reconstruct a life unimaginably richer than that from which the shards and pieces fell." – Craig D. Lounsbrough
• "When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude." – Gilbert K. Chesterton
• “I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude." – Benjamin Disraeli

• "'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say." – Alice Walker
• "Let me encourage you to get up every day and focus on what you do have in life. Be thankful for the blessings of the little things, even when you don't get what you expect." – Victoria Osteen
• "Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present." – Bil Keane
• "Kindness is always fashionable, and always welcome." – Amelia Barr
• "Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life." – Omar Khayyam
• "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart." – Helen Keller
• "There is always, always something to be thankful for." – Unknown
• “Thanksgiving...humbug. What good is it if you're on a diet?" – Garfield