I used to believe that gratitude for life came from being happy, but I have come to realize that the reverse is also true, perhaps even more so: being happy comes from feeling grateful for life.

There may be no better gateway to happiness than cultivating our gratitude.

There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.

Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God's point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God's will, the work of the kingdom. We are God's fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.

Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.

Having gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a gift and not deliver it.

Work and pray rather instead of watching and wishing.

If the only prayer you say throughout your life is "Thank You, " then that will be enough.

Gratitude bestows reverence... changing forever how we experience life and the world.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude." ? Elie Wiesel

Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don't understand His replies. We cannot under-stand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and re-main there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself. And why do you pray, Moishe? I asked him. I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.

Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims.