Top 15 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.

Look closely and you will find that people are happy because they are grateful. The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted.

We are never more than one grateful thought away from peace of heart.

In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In moments of surprise we catch at least a glimpse of the joy to which gratefulness opens the door.

Can you be grateful for everything? No. But in every moment.

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.