David Steindl-Rast > Quotes

“The root of joy is gratefulness...It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Look closely and you will find that people are happy because they are grateful. The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted. ”
― David Steindl-Rast, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day

“We are never more than one grateful thought away from peace of heart.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast

“In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefullness, and gratefullness is a measure of our aliveness.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast, Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings

“Any place is sacred ground, for it can become a place of encounter with the divine Presence.”
― David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness

“People who have faith in life are like swimmers who entrust themselves to a rushing river. They neither abandon themselves to its current nor try to resist it. Rather, they adjust their every movement to the watercourse, use it with purpose and skill, and enjoy the adventure.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being... Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it -- that alone can be like waking up from a dream.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“One single gift acknowledged in gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“Can you be grateful for everything? No. But in every moment.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“In moments of surprise we catch at least a glimpse of the joy to which gratefulness opens the door.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“It is not happiness that makes us grateful It is gratefulness that makes us happy. Every moment is a gift. … Whatever life gives to you, you can respond with joy. Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens. It is the grateful response to the opportunity that life offers you at this moment.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“Monastic contemplatives have staked out a clearly limited area to be transformed by contemplation: the monastery. Lay contemplatives face the challenge of transforming the whole world.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“As we learn to give thanks for all of life and death, for all of this given world of ours, we find a deep joy. It is the joy of trust, the joy of faith in the faithfulness at the heart of all things. It is the joy of gratefulness in touch with the fullness of life.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, The Heart Of Prayer: An Approach To Life In Fullness

“Whatever life gives to you, you can respond with joy. Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens. It is the grateful response to the opportunity that life offers you at this moment”
― STEINDL-RAST, David

“Is the relationship between God and Jesus Christ not unique? Of course it is. But so is yours. The relationship between God and every human being is unique and irreplaceable—in ever-new variations of the Christ theme.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed

“The greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving. In giving gifts, we give what we can spare, but in giving thanks we give ourselves.”
― David Steindl-Rast

“Nothing is more significant in Jesus’ parables than his appeal to Common Sense. What a pity that this term has been abused to mean no more than sweet reasonableness or, worse, public opinion. Rightly understood, it means the deep awareness that all have in common and from which anything sensible must flow. We could even say that Common Sense is God’s Holy Spirit in the human heart. And here Jesus differs from the prophets. They appealed to the authority of God as standing behind them—'Thus speaks the Lord God. …' Jesus, in contrast, appeals to Common Sense, to the authority of God in the hearts of his hearers. No wonder the people felt empowered. 'This man speaks with authority,' they said, and they added, 'not like the Scribes' (Mark 1:22), not like the authorities of cultural religion. ... As the very opposite to conventional thinking, Common Sense was, and still is, subversive to authoritarian structures and intolerable to their religious as well as political representatives.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed

“Meaning springs from belonging.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed

“The light of love shines “in the darkness” (John 1:5), in suffering, in confusion, in all that we will never understand. Love makes darkness itself shine. This opens altogether new possibilities for dealing creatively with the shadow side of reality. Words can only serve as pointers; we must put this to the test in our own dark hours. Those who have done so, those who have suffered lovingly, have discovered the transformative power of love.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed

“If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on getting the right idea of what absolute purity and perfection mean. We tend to get trapped in the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. On the level of religious doctrine, it's a God that is totally purged of anything that we call dark. Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light and we can't handle the darkness within us. And because we can't handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it's not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast

“True gratefulness is courage to give thanks for a gift before unwrapping it.”
― David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, The Heart Of Prayer: An Approach To Life In Fullness

“The term “peak experience” is a well-chosen term suggesting, for one thing, that it is somewhat elevated above your normal experience. It is a moment in which you are somehow high, or at any rate higher than at other moments. It is a moment, although it may last quite some time; even then that long time, say an hour or so, appears as a moment. It is always experienced as a point in time, just as the peak of a mountain is always a point. Now this may be a high peak or a low peak; the decisive thing is that it comes to a peak. So you look over your day or over your life or over any period of time, you see these peaks sticking out, and they are points of an elevated experience, points of an experience of vision, of insight if you want.”
― David Steindl-Rast, The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life

“After all, how could I be a person if Ultimate Reality were impersonal?”
― David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed

“At a certain pitch of religious experience, the heart just wants to sing; it breaks into song. Paradoxically, you could say when the silence finds its fullness, it comes to word.”
― David Steindl-Rast, The Music of Silence: Entering the Sacred Space of Monastic Experience

“The typical circumstance of a child when seen in public these days is one of being dragged along by a long arm, while whoever is dragging the child is saying, “Come on, let’s go! We don’t have any time. We have to get home (or somewhere else). Don’t just stand there. Do something.” That’s the gist of it. But other cultures—many Native American tribes, for example—had an entirely different ideal for education: “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and look when there is nothing to be seen,” and “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and listen when there is nothing to be heard.” Now that’s very different from our attitude, but it is very congenial to children.”
― David Steindl-Rast, The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life

“Now think of a situation in which something becomes meaningful to you. What is there to grasp? What is there to keep under control? That is not the idea. You will find yourself using expressions in which you are perfectly passive or at least more passive. “Responsive” is really the word, but you are more passive than in a situation in which you are accomplishing a purpose. You will say, “This really did something to me.”
― David Steindl-Rast, The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life