David Steindl-Rast Quotes - Page 2

From experience we know that whenever we are truly awake and alive, we are also truly grateful.

Solitude without togetherness deteriorates into loneliness. One needs strong roots in togetherness to be solitary rather than lonely when one is alone.

What is necessary when we want to face reality? Stillness.

Gratefulness makes us aware of the gift and makes us happy. As long as we take things for granted they don't make us happy. Gratefulness is the key to happiness. Practicing gratitude is so central to my spirituality.

There's opportunity upon opportunity to be grateful; that's what life is.

Gratefulness has the courage to trust and so overcomes fear.

One can learn to focus on "opportunity" as the gift within every given moment. This attitude towards life always improves the situation. Even in times of sickness, someone who habitually practices grateful living will look for the opportunity that a given moment offers and use it creatively.

Truth is something we discover by carrying it out. It is not a list of statements, but a direction of life.

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.

Beauty seen makes the one who sees it more beautiful.

Gratefulness is the great task, the how of our spiritual work, because, rightly understood, it re-roots us.

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.

Grateful living makes life meaningful and full of joy.

Home and journey together constitute the creative polarity of the heart, the two dimensions we must cultivate if we want to 'develop the heart.

...our happiness hinges not on good luck; it hinges on peace of heart.

What brings fulfillment is gratefulness, the simple response of our heart to this life in all its fullness.

If there is anything the artist or a true work of art teaches us, it is that variety and complexity really increase the unity, and that to achieve unity within a great variety of complexity is a greater achievement and more satisfying piece of art than to achieve unity with just a few elements, which is relatively easily achieved.

"The root of joy is gratefulness."

Gratitude is here presented as more than a feeling, a virtue, or an experience; gratitude emerges as an attitude we can freely choose in order to create a better life for ourselves and for others. The Nigerian Hausa put it this way: Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot.

"The Holy Spirit . . . wants to flow through us and realize all these wonderful possibilities in the world - if we only open ourselves and allow it to happen."

The artist ought to know that a thousand painful deaths always lead into greater life.

Impatience makes us get ahead of ourselves, reaching out for something in the future and not really being content with where we are, here and now.

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

Gratefulness is not just saying "thank you." It's acting. It is being yourself. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science.

Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.