It’s Thanksgiving (or it’s coming soon, depending on when you’re reading this).
A time of the year for families to come together. To laugh, share memories and food and let gratitude and love shine in the darkness of November.
So in today’s post I’d like to share 101 of the most meaningful, funny and loving Thanksgiving quotes for family.
I hope you’ll find something here to help you truly express how you feel at the dinner table, in a text or on a card or maybe via social media posts on Instagram.
Happy Thanksgiving Quotes for Family to Help You Express Your Love
“Having somewhere to go is home. Having someone to love is family. Having both is a blessing.”
– Donna Hedges
“The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.”
– Michael J. Fox
“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”
– Mother Teresa
“Nothing is better than going home to family and eating good food and relaxing.”
– Irina Shayk
“So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty.”
– Haniel Long
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.”
– Anthony Brandt
“Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”
– from the movie Lilo & Stitch
“That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.”
– Deb Caletti
“I sustain myself with the love of family.”
– Maya Angelou
“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues are created, strengthened and maintained.”
– Winston Churchill
“This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It’s knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.”
– Mitch Albom
“It didn’t matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it.”
– Peter Buffett
“What greater blessing to give thanks for at a family gathering than the family and the gathering.”
– Robert Brault
“In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another’s good, and bearing one another’s burdens.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
– Jane Howard
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”
– Desmond Tutu
“I love Thanksgiving because it’s a holiday centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me.”
– Marcus Samuelsson
“Home is people. Not a place.”
– Robin Hobb
Short Thanksgiving Quotes and Sayings for Family
“Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and gratitude.”
– Nigel Hamilton
“The most important thing in the world is family and love.”
– John Wooden
“Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for happiness.”
– Amy Collette
“The most thankful person is the most fully human.”
– John Henry Jowett
“Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.”
– Lionel Hampton
“The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time.”
– Douglas Wood
“Gratitude is the best attitude.”
– Unknown
“A grateful heart is a beginning of greatness.”
– James E. Faust
“Reflect upon your present blessings.”
– Charles Dickens
“A moment of gratitude makes a difference in your attitude.”
– Bruce Wilkinson
“Thankfulness creates gratitude which generates contentment that causes peace.”
– Todd Stocker
“No gesture is too small when done with gratitude.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.”
– Native American Proverb
“Life is better when you’re thankful.”
– Joyce Meyer
“Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.”
– William Shakespeare
“Kindness is always fashionable.”
– Amelia Barr
“Gratitude changes everything.”
– Marian Wright Edelman
“Thank you is the best prayer that anyone could say.”
– Alice Walker
“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”
– Karl Barth
“The thankful heart opens our eyes to a multitude of blessings that continually surround us.”
– James E. Faust
“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”
– John F. Kennedy
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
– Voltaire
Funny Thanksgiving Quotes for Family to Lighten the Mood
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I like football. I find its an exciting strategic game. It’s a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving.”
– Craig Ferguson
“It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a little emotional scarring.”
– Timothy Burke
“Thanksgiving is a magical time of year when families across the country join together to raise America’s obesity statistics.”
– Stephen Colbert
“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
“The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.”
– Jay McInerney
“What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?”
– Erma Bombeck
“Thanksgiving, man. Not a good day to be my pants.”
– Kevin James
“You can tell you ate too much for Thanksgiving when you have to let your bathrobe out.”
– Jay Leno
“Thanksgiving is a time to count your blessings, one by one, as each relative goes home.”
– Melanie White
“There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.”
– Jerry Seinfeld
“Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother’s tasted better the day before.”
– Rita Rudner
“I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.”
– Erma Bombeck
“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
“Every Thanksgiving I bring the champagne, because in my family we all know what our strengths are.”
– Gloria Fallon
“I love Thanksgiving traditions: watching football, making pumpkin pie and saying the magic phrase that sends your aunt storming out of the dining room to sit in her car.”
– Stephen Colbert
“Keep your friends close, but your relatives at a distance during Thanksgiving dinner.”
– David Letterman
“Family gathering: A time when relatives you haven’t seen all year magically appear just in time to critique your life choices.”
– Jen Lancaster
“Some family trees bear an enormous crop of nuts.”
– Wayne Huizenga
“So what do we do? We do what all families do. Grin, bear it, and pass the mashed potatoes.”
– Heather Brewer
“Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.”
– Erma Bombeck
Meaningful Thanksgiving Quotes for Your Parents
“My mother: She is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”
– Jodi Picoult
“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
“My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.”
– Michael Jordan
“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: He believed in me.”
– Jim Valvano
“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.”
– Melody Beattie
“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.”
– Maya Angelou
“My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it.”
– Clarence Budington Kelland
“We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.”
– Neal A. Maxwell
“My father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.”
– Liza Minnelli
“Appreciation can change a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.”
– Margaret Cousins
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”
– Willie Nelson
“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
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
– Dalai Lama
“Forever on Thanksgiving Day the heart will find the pathway home.”
– Wilbur D. Nesbit
“Great fathers don’t find fault. Great fathers find solutions.”
– Reed Markham
“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
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
– William Blake
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
– Meister Eckhart
“When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.”
– Dalai Lama
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
– G.K. Chesterton
Happy Thanksgiving Quotes for Your Kids
“What if today, we were just grateful for everything?”
– Charlie Brown
“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
– A.A. Milne
“If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.”
– W. Clement Stone
“There is always something to be thankful for.”
– Charles Dickens
“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton
“I can’t cook a Thanksgiving dinner. All I can make is cold cereal and maybe toast.”
– Charlie Brown
“Thanksgiving just gets me all warm and tingly and all kinds of wonderful inside.”
– Willard Scott
“When one has a grateful heart, life is so beautiful.”
– Roy Bennett
“Find gratitude in the little things and your well of gratitude will never run dry.”
– Antonia Montoya
“It’s funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”
– Germany Kent
“Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot.”
– Hausa Proverb
“Be thankful for what you have. Your life is someone else’s fairy tale.”
– Wale Ayeni
“Thanksgiving creates abundance.”
– Ann Voskamp
“The struggle ends when gratitude begins.”
– Neale Donald Walsch
“Be thankful for everything that happens in your life; it’s all an experience.”
– Roy T. Bennett
“The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become.”
– Robert Holden
“When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.”
– Kristin Armstrong
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”
– Aesop
“Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.”
– Randy Pausch
Want more positive inspiration for your Thanksgiving? Then have a look at these short Thanksgiving quotes, the Thanksgiving quotes for gratitude at work here and also this one with funny Thanksgiving quotes for a less stressful holiday.