David Steindl-Rast Quotes

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.

One single gift acknowledged in gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation.

Volite cijelim srcem,
Budite iznenađeni,
Zahvaljujte se i hvalite -
Tad ćete otkriti
Ispunjenost svog života.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the continuous flow of blessing our heart finds meaning and rest.

The greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving. In giving gifts, we give what we can spare, but in giving thanks we give ourselves.

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.

Any place is sacred ground, for it can become a place of encounter with the divine Presence.

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.

Times that challenge us physically, emotionally, and spiritually may make it almost impossible for us to feel grateful. Yet, we can decide to live gratefully, courageously open to life in all its fullness. By living in a gratefulness that we don’t feel, we begin to feel the gratefulness we live.

I compare tradition to a water main: the church suffers from the syndrome of rusty piping. If we could look into our subterranean water systems we would never drink water again. And yet they bring us clean water, even when they are rusty.

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.