Great Gifts Quotes

One of the great gifts of being a human being is that you can get rid of yourself and enter into the oneness of music. ~ Ray Manzarek

We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time. ~ Trina Paulus

If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accept yourself. Love yourself just as you are. Your finest work, your best moments, your joy, peace, and healing come when you love yourself. You give a great gift to the world when you do that. You give others permission to do the same: to love themselves. Revel in self love. Roll in it. Bask in it, as you would the sunshine. ~ Melody Beattie

That's one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn't begun to batter optimism. ~ Mike Barnicle

Fine Knacks for Ladies

Fine knacks for ladies, cheap, choice, brave and new!
Good pennyworths! but money cannot move.
I keep a fair but for the fair to view.
A beggar may be liberal of love,
Though all my wares be trash, the heart is true.

Great gifts are guiles and look for gifts again;
My trifles come as treasures from the mind.
It is a precious jewel to be plain;
Sometimes in shell the Orient's pearls we find.
Of others take a sheaf, of me a grain.

Within this pack pins points laces and gloves,
And diverse toys fitting a country fair.
But in my heart, where duty serves and loves,
Turtles and twins, court's brood, a heavenly pair.
Happy the heart that thinks of no removes! ~ John Dowland

All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Girls' hearts flourish in homes where they are seen and invited to become ever more themselves. Parents who enjoy their daughters are giving them and the world a great gift. Mothers in particular have the opportunity to offer encouragement to their daughters by inviting them into their feminine world and by treasuring their daughters' unique beauty. ~ Stasi Eldredge

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom. ~ Norman Lock

I'm only the instrument through which one particular art is expressed. Poetry flows through me but it originates in the wellspring of creation that is the source of us all. When you strike out at someone else's achievement you are attacking your own share of a great gift. ~ Morgan Llywelyn

Psychological growth is the great gift and inexorable fact of human life. ~ Jean Baker Miller

It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood - that is one of the great gifts that art affords. ~ Dana Gioia

Power as I possess is not, as many believe, given in exchange for a soul. To hear the ignorant speak, one would think it is merely a simple bargain, an exchange of vows, perhaps, and the power one seeks simply flows from the fingertips for the asking. But no, it is not so easy as that! The truly great gifts are not gifts at all, but treasures obtained after long and difficult searching, prizes won only through hard-fought victories over relentless, near-invincible adversaries. [ ... ]
The ignorant speak of hidden arts, but they are not hidden. Indeed, there is nothing secret about them at all; they are freely open and available to any who would pursue them. Ah, but the price! The price is nothing less than the devotion of an entire life. So perhaps the simple-minded are right, after all, in thinking of the acquisition of power as a pact in which the soul is bartered. There is no other way.
- Morgian ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

And I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven. ~ James Lee Burke

Faith is a great gift to have. ~ Bern Will Brown

What often separates the good from the great is a layer of innate ability, a gift, so it's partly that. There's many people with great gifts who don't work hard enough, or perhaps take it for granted, and therefore they don't have the passion and the commitment for it. ~ Paul Rankin

God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop. ~ John Mark Reynolds

If you can help guide somebody through a challenging moment because you've been there, that ends up becoming a great gift. ~ Christian Slater

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked - this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind - saving me from perils of overmuch desire. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the "sacred" part of your "contract" and the true meaning of your highest potential. ~ Caroline Myss

Great grace and small gifts are better than great gifts and no grace. ~ John Bunyan

Whatever you do with your life-whatever you end up achieving or not achieving-the great gift you have in you to give to the world is the gift of who you alone are; your way of seeing things, and saying things, and feeling about things, that is like nobody else's. If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill. ~ Frederick Buechner

Nature has provided two great gifts: life and then the diversity of living things, jellyfish and humans, worms and crocodiles. I don't undervalue the investigation of commonalities but can't avoid the conclusion that diversity has been relatively neglected, especially as concerns the brain. ~ Theodore Holmes Bullock

I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Great gift-giving involves three things: you feel what the other feels; you give freely; and you count sacrifice a bargain ... those gifts are truly great which are given simply for the joy they bring to another heart. ~ Henry B. Eyring

You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It's a great gift. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

All great gifts come with a great price, Bel murmured. ~ C.L. Wilson

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This Windows 95 hairball has become so big, so unmanageable, so hard to use, so hard to configure, so hard to keep up and running, so hard to keep secure. Windows 95 is a great gift to give your kid this Christmas because it will keep your kid fascinated for months trying to get it up and running and trying to figure out how to use it. ~ Scott McNealy

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy. All this I am fully aware of. I know too, however, that of the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening – Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money – it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch. Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost. One can usually trace in the wrinkled lines of a nonagenarian, stooped and leaning on a stick, the style and confidence that turned heads in a ballroom in 1929. ~ Julian Fellowes

If people would treat themselves with the same kind of love they give to their friends, that would be such a great gift we could give ourselves. ~ Cindy Crawford

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that. ~ Dani Shapiro

This is a key point which the secularists are missing: they think that stressing God's mercy means that sins are no longer sins. On the contrary, God's mercy is a great gift of grace precisely because sins are sins and they call for repentance and forgiveness. ~ Thomas J. Paprocki

Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier's "discoveries" had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859. ~ Bill Bryson

Find what you love, because greatness is based on great gifts. If you love something, you can count on the fact that you are genetically gifted at it. ~ Barbara Sher

Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition was the craving to stifle his better self. ~ Otto Weininger

Melissa Pritchard's prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance. ~ Antonya Nelson

Being able to scream at the top of my lungs in front of people is very therapeutic. It is a great gift for me to be able to do that. ~ Dave Matthews

Within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit.
Within every problem is an opportunity.
Even in the knocks of life, we can find great gifts. ~ Napoleon Hill

To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is ... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it. ~ Terry Goodkind

As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one - nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost. ~ Alan Bradley

Humor is such a great gift - why leave it to chance? ~ Joel Goodman

One of the great gifts of the arcade was the way it put us all on the same level. ~ Drew Nellins Smith

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky. ~ Ayn Rand

From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage. ~ Colin Woodard

The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech, wisdom, needlework, and chastity. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Any great gift of power or talent is a burden ... But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law. ~ Susan Cooper

The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle. ~ James A. Michener

If you knew what a sensation of the nearness of a higher power one instinctively feels when one is permitted to contribute to the good of mankind, as I have done, and still do! Believe me, it is a great gift of God's mercy! ~ Jenny Lind

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective. ~ Dan Chaon

It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery method continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

We Americans have the great gifts of freedom and democracy, but it has been our education system that has fulfilled the promise of democracy. ~ James E. Rogers

Each of us has great gifts, but many of us severely limit ourselves with negative attitudes about our potential. ~ Gene R. Cook

One of yoga's great gifts to making is the discovery of the link that exists between energy, breath, and mind. As you change one, you also change the other two. If you excite one, the other two become excited and, conversely, if you calm one, the other two respond by becoming calm also. ~ John Novak

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships ... and also a few enmities. ~ Grace Paley

Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved. ~ Maria Edgeworth

I was just thinking about how Christmas is right around the corner, but no matter how you choose to celebrate the holidays, books in general make great gifts! ~ Lauren Graham

It's like we learn to think something's ugly. Maybe if we're could all stop being taught that only certain things are right or pretty, or that only certain things are the way that everything else should be, you know, I mean physically, then we could start looking at things through fresh eyes. And then we're wouldn't look at things or people in a way that would make them sad or that would exclude them. It might even stop us from constantly trying to change our own body image, and maybe we'd just learn to enjoy what we have, enjoy what great gifts we've been given and revel in them instead of wishing they'd be different. ~ John C. Horst

A great gift - a gift of Dharma conquers all gifts. ~ Gautama Buddha

To see is one of God's great gifts to man and to comprehend what we see is doubly so. Furthermore, He has endowed some people with the qualities to see the beauties of life and nature much more than others and they have the greatest gift of all. ~ Waite Phillips

One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East. ~ Roger Scruton

The Dream Lover is a historical novel at once expansively researched yet intimately imagined. George Sand may be the ultimate Berg heroine. 'A life not lived in truth,' Berg writes, 'is a life forfeited.' In this latest work, Elizabeth Berg has poured her own great gifts and her own great heart into the story of a woman determined to refuse any such forfeiture, no matter the cost. ~ Leah Hager Cohen

If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention
them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that
they died
you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What
you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and
... that is a great gift. ~ Elizabeth Edwards

The wise man looks at death with honesty, dignity and calm, recognizing that the tragedy it brings is inherent in the great gift of life. ~ Corliss Lamont

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his great gifts ... the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element. ~ Carl Jung

one of the great gifts of our profession is that the process
of doing what we do allows us to become better human beings. ~ Marianne Schneider Corey

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world! ~ Neil Gaiman

Lee's great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management. ~ Cheryl Crawford

Having a sous-chef with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God's great gifts. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Who can be 100 percent sure of one's choices in life? How do you know that your beloved will always remain the same, or that you'll never change your mind? Growth and change are two of the great gifts we get from time. It would be shortsighted to spurn them. ~ Alma Katsu

A great gift is an answer waiting for a question. ~ Kevin Kling

I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift. ~ Twyla Tharp

Let us thank God for having called us to His holy faith. It is a great gift, and the number of those who thank God for it is small. ~ Alphonsus Liguori

I think he would have been proud and smiling ... when we laid him to rest because his family was together. I think that was a great gift to be able to give Dad at the end. ~ Michael Reagan

It is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available. ~ Elizabeth Janeway

After the great hurt and defeat in your life will come your great gifts that will bring you joy. Like the rainbow after the storm telling you ... now go and enjoy your life! For In everything in this life ... God is always good. ~ Timothy Pina

Look at me." His voice was all seriousness, the teasing gone. I lifted my eyes to meet his blazing blue ones. "Don't say that. It's not true. You've given me this." He took my hand and placed it over his heart. "And this." He put his hand over my heart. "And this." He put both our hands over my belly and left them there. "There are no great gifts, Brynne. ~ Raine Miller

If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift. ~ Charlie Munger

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut. ~ Michael Dirda

The great gift of the human imagination is that it has no limits or ending. ~ Jim Rohn

My next record I really just want it to be a collection of great songs, classic songs in a way. ~ Marc Almond

My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I believe in nurturing creativity and offering a haven for creators, enabling them to develop their ideas to the fullest. With more and more talented creators being drawn to Cirque in an environment that fulfills them, these are ideal to continue developing great new shows. ~ Guy Laliberte

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts. ~ Lao-Tzu

I don't presume to describe myself as a creator anymore, but I certainly love the process, and I hope I can do a lot of great things for the talent who are in and around DC. ~ Diane Nelson

The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation ... Men die, they said, but reputation does not die. ~ Bernard Cornwell

With any good projects, I feel like the off-screen chemistry factors on-screen. It's great when you don't have to force it, but when it's not there you better focus on getting there, because as we live with these characters we spend more time with one another than we do our families at home. ~ Aldis Hodge

The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon. ~ Shana Alexander

Perhaps I will be a great man ... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course ~ Lorraine Hansberry

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. ~ Russell Kirk

22And Samuel said, w Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, x to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. ~ Anonymous

No person is more convinced than I am of the necessity of giving great splendour and energy to the great hereditary magistracy exercised by the king; but in a free country, there can only be citizens and public officers. ~ Marquis De Lafayette

I do not know…who turned me, your Grace."
His downcast gaze said it all: How terribly sad.
For she had known all her life as a Vampire it was most…disgraceful to never know the one who turned you; that was where a Vampire could find a sense of great peace amidst the life that was the constant need for blood. She had only passed by these remarks, this cloud on her person for being 'Princess of the Vampires,' Dracula's special child… ~ S.C. Parris

The legacy of the New Del was, more than anything else, a matter of ideological change. Henceforth, nearly everyone would look to the federal government for solutions to problems great and small, real and imagined, personal as well as social. ~ Robert Higgs

As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it. ~ Jarvis Cocker

I don't get any parts I don't get offered. There are lots of great things out there I would like to do that I don't get offered. ~ Aidan Quinn

The thing that demons hate most is the sound of a ticking clock, "for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time" (Revelation 12:12). ~ Larry Zoro

I do everything I do to pay tribute to my great-grandfather. ~ Nik Wallenda

Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves. ~ Richard Bach

The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless. ~ Woodrow Wilson