Complaints And Gratitude Quotes

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.

Complaint is a cancer to wealth. But gratitude is an amplifier of wealth.

De leur meilleur côté tâchons de voir les choses: Vous vous plaignez de voir les rosiers épineux; Moi je me réjouis et rends grâces aux dieux Que les épines aient des roses.

Replace a complaint thought with one of gratitude or compassion.

The leap of faith always means loving without expecting to be loved in return, giving without wanting to receive, inviting without hoping to be invited, holding without asking to be held. And every time I make a little leap, I catch a glimpse of the One who runs out to me and invites me into his joy, the joy in which I can find not only myself, but also my brothers and sisters. Thus the disciplines of trust and gratitude reveal the God who searches for me, burning with desire to take away all my resentments and complaints and to let me sit at his side at the heavenly banquet.

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile, even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.

To bear an unbearable weight put on us by life, we seek strength from our long forgotten inner roots. Roots bear the weight only up to a limit. Then they let something old break in us and something new grow. At that point of transformation, we say good bye to the weight with no complaint, only gratitude.

Try to live one entire day in utter thanksgiving. Balance every complaint with ten gratitudes, every criticism with ten compliments.

That very breath wherewith they utter their complaints is a blessing and a fundamental one too for if God would withdraw that they were incapable of whatsoever else either have or desire.

I’m in awe of the people who manage their difficult lives with little complaint, those who have suffered more than their fair share of pain, and understand things could have been much worse, those who take the time to be grateful for the important things, and who never give up on themselves or their lives. It's no easy feat to stay optimistic when life has shown you too much darkness, yet our world is filled with these steady, strong, resilient warriors of the light. From them, we have so much to learn.

Nobody is ever there to help you, he thought. They are there to process you. They are not there to solve the world for you, but to solve you for the world. And they are not there to bring your dreams to fruition, but to grind them out of you, slowly, meticulously, so that you will crawl and grovel, without complaining, without a single complaint, perhaps even with a few murmurs of obsequious gratitude, into a life you did not ask for, and to remain there, without thought of your old aspirations, the futures you have discarded, the lives you let slip, your old crazed hopes—to put all these aside, and to remain content, content to be anything but an inconvenience, to the great process.

Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty

We only see things which we want to see in this world. If you want to see only negative you will find this world full of negativity, pain and bad things. But the moment you want to see magic in the universe, if will appear at every moment in your life. Never allow your heart to be filled with hatred, jealousy, complaints, etc... Replace them with compassion, vision and gratitude.

We can allow ourselves to be found by God and healed by his love through the concrete and daily practice of trust and gratitude. Trust and gratitude are the disciplines for the conversion of the elder son. By telling myself that I am not important enough to be found, I amplify my self-complaint. I must totally disown my self-rejecting voice and claim the truth that God does indeed want to embrace me as much as he does my wayward brothers and sisters.

I noticed early on in motherhood that my children inherited my tendency toward the negative. Years ago, while driving home from a soccer game, I was listening to my kids whine about their day. Practically everything made their list of complaints, and I was sick of it. I decided something had to change, so I made up a new game. "All right, Luka and Matea," I yelled from the front seat, "I have a new game for us. It's called Yeah, But. Every time you have something negative to say, you have to follow it up with a 'Yeah, but . . . " and then add something positive. I'll start. Ugh, I'm almost out of gas and the last thing I feel like doing right now is stopping at a gas station. Yea, but . . . I have a car! And I have money for gas, and I don't ever want to take those things for granted. Okay, your turn now.

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted. If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesn't pay much attention to 'luck'. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with 'luck'; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you can't really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen. The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being works better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls 'contingency') that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.

We can change our habits. We needn’t be at the mercy of thoughts like ‘that’s just my personality’ or ‘it’s in my genes so there’s nothing I can do about it’. Negative habits can be replaced with positive ones, selfish ones with kind ones, suspicion with trust, hostility with empathy and complaints with gratitude. – David R. Hamilton, Why Kindness is Good for You

Most people, like the Israelites, complain far more often than they express gratitude. People frequently register a complaint with a manufacturer or service provider, but they rarely write a note of thanks for a job well done. We would all do well to consider writing a thank you note each time we write a letter of complaint. Similarly, and more importantly, too many people criticize their spouses more often than they compliment them. That is the road to an unhappy marriage.

The city's earthly lights blotted out the stars as always. The sky was nice and clear, but only a few stars were visible, the very bright ones that twinkled as pale points here and there. Still, the moon stood out clearly against the sky. It hung up there faithfully, without a word of complaint concerning the city lights or the noise or the air pollution. It he focused hard on the moon, he could make out the strange shadows formed by its gigantic craters and valleys. Tengo's mind emptied as he stared at the light of the moon. Inside him, memories that had been handed down from antiquity began to stir. Before human beings possessed fire or tools or language, the moon had been their ally. It would calm people's fears now and then by illuminating the dark world like a heavenly lantern. Its waxing and waning gave people an understanding of the concept of time. Even now, when darkness had been banished from most parts of the world, there remained a sense of human gratitude toward the moon and its unconditional compassion. It was imprinted upon human genes likes a warm collective memory.

Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

Frequently I will end a service of worship in our congregation by saying something like, "Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life." I'm not certain that there are such things as measures of our spirituality, but if there are, then gratitude is probably the best one. It indicates that we are paying attention.

Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet. William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted. “E

Prayer and Meditation Matthew 14 AND HE WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN APART TO PRAY This was always the practice of Jesus when he would move into the masses, the crowd, afterwards he would go alone into deep prayer and meditation. Why did he do this? If you have been meditating, you will understand. You will understand that once you start meditating, a very fragile and delicate quality of consciousness is born in you. A flower of the unknown, of the beyond, starts opening, which is delicate. And whenever you move into the crowd, you lose something. Whenever you come back from the crowd, you come back lesser than you had gone. Something has been lost, some contact has been lost. The crowd pulls you down, it has a gravitation of it's own. You may not feel it if you live on the same plane of consciousness. Then there is no problem, then you have nothing to lose. In fact, when you live in the crowd, on the same plane, alone you feel very uneasy. When you are with people, you feel good and happy. But alone, you feel sad, your aloneness is not aloneness. It is loneliness, you miss the other. You do not find yourself in the aloneness, you simply miss the other. When you are alone, you are not alone, beacuse you are not there. Only the desire to be with others is there - that is what loneliness is. Always remember the distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is a peak experience - loneliness is a valley. Aloneness has light in it, loneliness is dark. Loneliness is when you desire others; aloneness is when you enjoy yourself. When Jesus would move into the masses, into the crowd, he would tell his disciples to got to the other shore of the lake, and he would move into total aloneness. Not even the disciples were allowed to be with him. This was a constant practice with him. Whenever you go into the crowd, you are infected by it. You need a higher altitude to purify yourself, you need to be alone so that you can become fresh again. You need to be alone with yourself, so that you become together again. You need to be alone, so that you become centered and rooted in yourself again. Whenever you move with others, they push you off centre. AND WHEN THE EVENING WAS COME, HE WAS THERE ALONE Nothing is said about his prayer in the Bible, just the word "prayer". Before God or before existence, you simply need to be vulnerable - that is prayer. You are no to say something. So when you go into prayer, don't start saying something. It will all be desires, demands and deep complaints to God. And prayer with complaints is no prayer, a prayer with deep gratitude is prayer. There is no need to say something, you can just be silent. Hence nothing is said about what Jesus did in his aloneness. It simply says "apart to pray". He went apart, he became alone. That is what prayer is, to be alone, where the other is not felt, where the other is not standing between you and existence. When God's breeze can pass througn you, unhindered. It is a cleansing experience. It revejunates your spirit. To be with God simply means to be alone. You can miss the point, if you start thinking about God, then you are not alone. If you start talking to God, then in imagination you have created the other. And then you God is a projection, it will be a projection of your father. A prayer is not to say something. It is to be silent, open, available. And there is no need to believe in God, because that too is a projection. The only need is to be alone, to be capable of being alone - and immediately you are with God. Whenever you are alone, you are with God.

This is what sin does to us all. At a deep and often unnoticed level, sin replaces worship of God with worship of self. It replaces submission with self-rule. It replaces gratitude with demands for more. It replaces faith with self-reliance. It replaces vertical joy with horizontal envy. It replaces a rest in God’s sovereignty with a quest for personal control. We live for our glory. We set up our rules. We ask others to serve our agenda. We curse whatever gets in our way. We hate having to wait. We get upset when we have to go without. We strike back when we think we have been wronged. We do all we can to satisfy our cravings. We think too much about our own pleasure. We envy those who have what we think we deserve. We pout when we think we have been overlooked. We hate suffering of any kind. We manipulate others for our own good. We attempt to work ourselves into positions of power and control. We are obsessed about what is best for us. We demand more than we serve, and we take more than we give. We long to be first and hate being last. We are all too concerned with being right, being noticed, and being affirmed. We find it easier to judge those who have offended us than to forgive them. We require life to be predictable, satisfying, and easy. We do all these things because we are full of ourselves, in awe more of ourselves than of God. This is what Paul is talking about when he writes that Christ “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves” (2 Cor. 5:15). Here we see the great replacement again. It is what sin does to us all; no longer living for God, we live for ourselves. The myriad of dysfunctions of the human community can be traced to this one thing: awe. When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community. You see it played out in a thousand ways every day. If you listen, you will discover that the universal language of sinners in this broken world is complaint. When you’re at the center, when you feel entitled, when your desires dominate your heart, and when it really is all about you, you will have much to complain about. It is amazing how much more natural complaint is for us than thanks or how much more we tend to grumble than we tend to praise. We talk much more about what we want than about what we have been given. Notice how much we compare what we have to what others have and how little of the time we are satisfied. Listen to people very long, and you’ll hear the drone of complaint far more frequently than you’ll hear the melody of thankfulness. You see, we don’t first have a grumbling problem. No, we have an awe problem that results in a life of personal dissatisfaction and complaint. When awe of self replaces awe of God, praise will be rare and grumbling plentiful.

Lord, pardon our complaints and fears; increase our faith, patience, love, and gratitude; teach us to rejoice in tribulation and in hope.

A person buys eyeglasses and only then appreciates what his sound eyes were to him. A person becomes ill, and only then perceives what an immense treasure health was to him. A person loses some members of the family, some relative or friend, and only then sees how many good people God had given him. And so on. Why must we fail to appreciate anything, until we have lost it? True, there is much grief in life, but there are also many little sunny joys which we are unwilling to see. Yet, if these could elicit such loud prayers of gratitude from our lips as the loud complaints which grief makes us utter, we would certainly bear the burden of life as easily as a certain laborer bore his knapsack with the little cricket in it.

Let them that don't want it have memories of not gettin' any." "Gratitude is riches and complaint is poverty and the worst I ever had was wonderful." …

The Complaint Free challenge is not an easy one. It takes time and conscious effort to make it through that first complaint-free day. But once your habits and your thinking start to change, it becomes easier. The key is to keep trying. For me, this challenge was not just about stopping complaining; it’s about turning the complaints into gratitude for the blessings that I have. I see the good instead of only seeing things to complain about.

She stopped to inspect some of the blossoms on the almond trees and watched the butterflies flap tiny wings from the bushes to the skies. Oh, to have such freedom. Like a bird, they were not confined to the king's palaces or a specific set of rooms. If she thought on it overmuch, she had to admit that in her new life she felt more like a bird caged than one set free. And she missed her family. Not Mordecai, for she saw him often, but her cousins, their wives, the children. Especially the children. How long had it been since she had chased Isha through the house and taught the children of Noah! She walked past the almond trees, forcing her mind to ponder the beauty around her. Gratitude was a better choice than lonely complaints.

Gratitude, with no complaints, is the attitude that I would like to have, not only at the end of my life, but from now until then.

Celebrating the Eucharist requires that we stand in this world accepting our co-responsibility for the evil that surrounds and pervades us. As long as we remain stuck in our complaints about the terrible times in which we live and the terrible situations we have to bear and the terrible fate we have to suffer, we can never come to contrition. And contrition can grow only out of a contrite heart. When our losses are pure fate, our gains are pure luck! Fate does not lead to contrition, nor luck to gratitude.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce. -- To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think. To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I’m like this because I was raised wrong—browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!

By seeing this food as medicine, I will consume it without attachment or complaint, Not to increase my arrogance, strength, or good looks, But solely to sustain my life.

Our misery and unhappiness, according to Rumi, is directly connected to our insolence and refusal to praise. Sadly, instead of thankfulness, we developed an ungrateful nature. Sa’adi strikes at our self-centered ego: The sun, the moon, the air, the water and theearth are all serving you, aiding life’s purpose,and preparing for your food. Yet, you regard allthis unthankfully, absorbed in your own littletroubles, which are as nothing before the greatforces of nature, always working, night and day. When our tongue desires to complain, we should go contrary to it and find a reason to be thankful instead. For anything that could be better, there is always something else that could be worse. If we overcome our culture of complaint and get in touch with gratitude, it will change the way we see everything. The thought of the self will vanish, and the thought of others will take root. Rather than always wanting, we will care more about giving. Instead of relying on our imperfect understanding, we will look up to find greater meaning. Even virtues, such as tolerance and forgiveness, will arise in our hardened hearts as they soften. Life will thus unfold itself more beautifully. Our half-empty cup will fill to the brim. So when I say, “I can’t complain,” you should understand what I truly mean: I choose not to.

Life Lessons Complaining is easy, appreciating is difficult. When an immature mind focusses on an immediate problem, it complains. Life is vast, but when the mind focusses on only one disturbing aspect of life, life narrows down to that perspective. When you focus on life holistically, there are several things to be grateful about. Gratitude brings peace and complaints bring disturbance. Even God won’t be able to help those who complain a lot. The mind has a tendency to complain about anything that is labeled bad. The trick is to help the mind discover the rare gems of goodness in life’s garbage dump of negativity. When the mind is trained to focus on things to be grateful for, its complaining nature slowly fizzles out.

Crying out and complaining to Allâh does not mean that a person has no patience. In the Qur’ân, we find Ya‘qûb (عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ) saying: “My course is comely patience (sabrun jamîl)” (Yûsuf 12:83), but his love and longing for his lost son Yûsuf made him say: “How great is my grief for Yûsuf” (Yûsuf 12:83). Sabrun jamîl refers to patience with no complaint to other people. Complaining to Allâh does not cancel out patience, as Ya‘qûb said: “I only complain of my distraction and anguish to Allâh” (Yûsuf 12:86).

Literature that grows from a particular place or culture contains a set of identifying markers, and one of its functions is to articulate - in voices we recognise as our own - hope and complaint, gratitude and intent, praise and criticism; to speak of what unites us and what divides us, of love and loss, of truth and principle.

Letters of friends are good to receive, but we should be able to live happily without them. Visits are gifts to be valued, but without them we should not fall into the temptation of a brooding mood. Phone calls, “just to say hello,” can fill us with gratitude, but when we expect them as a necessary way to sedate our fear of being left alone, we are becoming the easy victims of our self-complaints. We are always in search of a community that can offer us a sense of belonging, but it is important to realize that being together in one place, one house, one city or one country is only secondary to the fulfillment of our legitimate desire.

Zero for complaint and 100 for gratitude.

Ban the word busy and see what it feels like to talk about your life differently. “I’m so busy” is usually a complaint. You roll your eyes, shrug your shoulders, and often sigh when rambling about your busy day. Instead, talk about your day with gratitude.

You know that the topmost priority for any head is that every single person in his team should be able to do his/her job with perfection and without complaint. Secondly he should be cooperative with other team members so that they can deliver projects on time. But imagine if as a head, all you get to hear are complaints, conspiracies and the nagging attitude of people to somehow evade the job. The rhythm of the universe is almost the same it searches for humans who can be grateful in life for the task assigned to them and can cooperate with other living beings to create a harmonious environment.

Therefore, God's chosen ones, holy and loved, put on heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, 13 accepting one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a complaint against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. 14 Above all, put on love — the perfect bond of unity. 15 And let the peace of the Messiah, to which you were also called in one body, control your hearts. Be thankful. 16 Let the message about the Messiah dwell richly among you, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, and singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Gratitude is not something we give to God because he wants to make sure we know how much trouble he went to over us. Gratitude is the gift God gives us that enables us to be blessed by all his other gifts, the way our taste buds enable us to enjoy the gift of food. Without gratitude, our lives degenerate into envy, dissatisfaction, and complaints, taking what we have for granted and always wanting more.

Whenever you feel a spark of love or goodwill towards another person – male, female, young or old – feed it so that it will grow. It is not about finding the right person or people. People are not that right. Even if they start out right, we soon have a litany of complaints. The only answer is to be the right person ourselves. Then everything will have a tendency to work together in a good way. And when it does work, don’t then be waving contracts, written or invisible, in front of people. Love that controls is not love but a contract. It says, "You must love me in this way," not "I love you." You have your freedom and life has its own justice so you don’t need to jump into the driving seat before the other person has an opportunity to. Just love. Love freely and genuinely. Love openly and with courage. And forgive, forgive, forgive. People are a mass of problems. Stop remembering them all or there will be no room to create the beautiful moments you wish to cherish in your soul.

Wrong. The children have ruined Christmas for the adults.’ Agatha looked at him, puzzled. ‘How do you explain that?’ ‘They’ve come to expect to get exactly what they want. I know all this from friends of mine with children. Something new comes out in July, say. They clamour for it. No use saying, “Wait till Christmas.” They have to have it right away because it’ll be old hat by Christmas. They don’t want surprises. They want what they demand. So there are no shining faces under the Christmas tree, radiant with surprise and gratitude. Only complaints like, “Why did you buy me this computer game? It’s months old.” Greedy children and disappointed parents, that’s Christmas.