“The best way to be thankful is to use the goods the gods provide you.”

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 147

Source: Leaving Home‎ (1987), p. 9
Context: Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.

A Short History of Decay (1949)

"Self-Culture", an address in Boston (September 1838) http://www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm
Context: I have insisted on our own activity as essential to our progress; but we were not made to live or advance alone. Society is as needful to us as air or food. A child doomed to utter loneliness, growing up without sight or sound of human beings, would not put forth equal power with many brutes; and a man, never brought into contact with minds superior to his own, will probably run one and the same dull round of thought and action to the end of llfe.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.

Mary Marston (1881), Chapter V

Rudens, Act IV, sc. 7, line 3; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Variant translation: [A] word to the wise! Keep what the Gods have given you. (translation by Cleveland King Chase)
Rudens (The Rope)

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)