Top 60 David Steindl-Rast Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Joy is that kind of happiness that does not depend on what happens.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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2. “Gratefulness is the inner gesture of giving meaning to our life by receiving life as gift.”

— David Steindl-Rast

3. “The antidote to exhaustion may not be rest. It may be wholeheartedness. You are so exhausted because all of the things you are doing are just busyness. There’s a central core of wholeheartedness totally missing from what you’re doing.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

6. “Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning.”

— David Steindl-Rast

7. “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.”

— David Steindl-Rast

8. “Love is saying yes to belonging.”

— David Steindl-Rast

9. “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.”

— David Steindl-Rast

10. “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

11. “As I express my gratitude, I become more deeply aware of it. And the greater my awareness, the greater my need to express it. What happens here is a spiraling ascent, a process of growth in ever expanding circles around a steady center.”

— David Steindl-Rast

12. “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.”

— David Steindl-Rast

13. “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

14. “Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy – because we will always want to have something else or something more.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

16. “Gratefulness is the gallantry of a heart ready to rise to the opportunity a given moment offers.”

— David Steindl-Rast

17. “Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise then you will discover the fullness of your life.”

— David Steindl-Rast

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Gratefulness has the courage to trust and so overcomes fear.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

22. “Each string of a wind harp responds with a different note to the same breeze. What activity makes you personally resonate most strongly, most deeply?”

— David Steindl-Rast

23. “Blessing is the lifeblood throbbing through the universe.”

— David Steindl-Rast

24. “Each one of us is called to become that great song that comes out of the silence, and the more we let ourselves down into that great silence the more we become capable of singing that great song.”

— David Steindl-Rast

25. “Beauty seen makes the one who sees it more beautiful.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

27. “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

28. “Only gratefulness, in the form of limitless openness for surprise, lays hold of the fullness of life in hope.”

— David Steindl-Rast

29. “If you learn to respond as if it’s the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

31. “When you focus so much on the word, you tend to neglect the realm of silence.”

— David Steindl-Rast

32. “Faith is the courageous confidence that trusts in the Source of all gifts.”

— David Steindl-Rast

33. “A single crocus blossom ought to be enough to convince our heart that springtime, no matter how predictable, is somehow a gift, gratuitous, gratis, a grace.”

— David Steindl-Rast

34. “The hope that is left after all your hopes are gone – that is pure hope, rooted in the heart.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

36. “The challenge is to learn to respond immediately to whatever it is time for. Not to wonder whether you have time for it or whether you like it, but simply to respond when it is time.”

— David Steindl-Rast

37. “Gratefulness is that fullness of life for which we are all thirsting.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

39. “We can’t really waste our time; we have to see that we are all in the same boat and that different religious traditions point in the same direction, and now let’s get moving together, doing something for peace.”

— David Steindl-Rast

40. “The experience of love and the experience of death destroy the illusion of our self-sufficiency. The two are closely connected, and to become fully human we must experience both of them.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

42. “Meaning springs from belonging.”

— David Steindl-Rast

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

— David Steindl-Rast

44. “At any moment the fully present mind can shatter time and burst into Now.”

— David Steindl-Rast

45. “The goal is partly the enjoyment; it doesn’t come later, but within the very process of the struggle.”

— David Steindl-Rast

46. “Any change in attitude changes the way one sees the world, and this in turn changes the way one acts.”

— David Steindl-Rast

47. “Through people that I did know or through things that I did touch, I am connected with everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. Everything hangs together with everything.”

— David Steindl-Rast

48. “Order is the disposition of things in which each gives to the other its room, its own proper place. That’s the external aspect. The other is that order that springs from love: there’s no other way of establishing order except through love.”

— David Steindl-Rast

49. “If you’re really mind-full, and if you underline that aspect of fullness, wholeness, or wholeheartedness, it reveals the gift character of everything.”

— David Steindl-Rast

50. “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