These Thanksgiving Quotes Capture the True Meaning of the Holiday (2024)

In her 2009 “What I Know for Sure” column for O magazine’s December issue, Oprah said about the subject of giving: “The best gift anyone can give, I believe, is the gift of sharing themselves.”

“Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation,” the evangelical Christian author wrote in his book When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box.

“Focusing on one thing that you are grateful for increases the energy of gratitude and rises the joy inside yourself,” Winfrey said on Oprah's Life Class in 2011.

“Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast,” Shakespeare wrote in The Comedy of Errors.

“Gratitude paints little smiley faces on everything it touches,” the author wrote in her book Smile Anyway.

“Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance,” the spiritual teacher wrote on Twitter.

“The most thankful person is the most fully human,” the theologian and preacher wrote in his book What Happens When I Pray.

In his October 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving, the president said: “I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens...to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations,” the Irish playwright wrote in A Woman of No Importance.

“Gratitude opens the door to...the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude,” Chopra said in a 2012 episode of Oprah's Lifeclass.

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them,” the former president of the United States said during his 1963 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation.

“Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery,” poet Mark Nepo said in a 2014 piece for the Huffington Post.

“That’s the gift of gratitude: In order to feel it, your ego has to take a backseat,” Oprah wrote in the December 2013 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

“Even in the trials of life, if we have eyes to see them, we can find good things everywhere we look,” the cohost of Fixer Upper wrote on her blog Magnolia.

“Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful,” the American novelist wrote in his 2010 book Eating Animals.

“Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts,” the author wrote in his 1957 book Pathways to Happiness.