YouSaid · the spoken record

David Steindl-Rast

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-03-19
most recent: 2025-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What a gift that is and what a surprise. And I never expected it. Wonderful, very grateful for it. But everything is surprising.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To belonging. We all belong together. And we live on a limited planet and we cannot have unlimited goals, unlimited planets.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't count it, but I read it, so I believe it. It's very good. For every day of the year, fear not, fear not. That is the main thing, because it's the opposite of the power pyramid, out of fear, violence, out of fear, greed, out of fear. Rivalry, all these bad things and out of trust in life comes cooperation, peace, sharing. That's what we need today. What we have to do.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now comes the point how should it motivate you? And it should motivate you by looking at the others as your equals. We belong together. But the anger itself, that burst of energy, let's use it. Let's use it positively. And positively means by remembering we belong together. This is our world. This is one world. I know.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually have a rather positive view of anger. Do you? Anger gives you a lot of energy. So the anger in itself, that burst of energy is something very positive. So bat yourself on the shoulder if you are alive.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the third activity is working with your hands. So everybody works with their hands part of the time, part of the day that keeps you down to earth. That's typically Benedictine. And my favorite work, now at my age there isn't much else I can do is washing the dishes. With your hands. But that is also a wonderful way of stop, go. You feel the dish tows. You feel the warm water and the cold rinsing water. You are aware of it. You become aware of it. That is the joy. Most people don't like washing dishes, but it can be a real communication with life. That would even be an entrance to a life of grateful living by asking yourself, what do I hate to do? Start with that and then find the opportunity in it, in that thing that up to now you hated it, now you find, and what opportunity does it give me?”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we do basically three activities, kinds of activities. The one is we have a choir, we pray in choir, and we pray seven times a day sometimes that's adjusted and so, but basically at sunrise, at noon, at sunset and in between at those hours. So we have what we call the hours of the day. We come together, we chant. Many people nowadays like this. Like chanting, yes, yes. They feel that. So we chant. We pray together. We chant. That is one of our activities. The other one is that we study or meditate on scripture but also on all sorts of other things.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I started studying anything, fending any alibi that I could find. So studying this and how to finish that, studied art, and then I studied. You don't go to the United States in order to become a monk. No, you don't. You're running away from it. And then I told a friend, you know, if I had lived in the Middle Ages, I would have joined the Benedictines, but I want that original spirit. And I told this to a friend and he said, oh, that's funny. I just read that they started a monastery in Margaret, New York, and it's supposed to be a reform of the Benedictine life, and they want to come back to the original fervor of the rule. And that was it. I went there and I knew that was it. Love at first sight. And I would do it again.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It came back to my mind, and I thought, but that's why we were so joyful, you know, because we had death before our eyes, we had to live in the present moment. We had a wonderful youth. I wouldn't want to treat it against anything with all the hardship. And that because I had read it in the rule of St. Benedict, I thought, well, probably I should become a Benedictine monk, but I didn't like the idea at all. Prana was running away from it for many years. Really? Yeah, yeah.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I just described, this situation in which you have to live in the present moment because the bombs are going left and right and in every other way your life is endangered. This living in the present moment, that is what gives you joy in life. As I've read this sentence in a little book called The Rule of Saint Benedict, that is the rule according to which the Benedictine monks lives for 1500 years now. And we read it only because we wanted to do something spiteful against our Nazi teachers and we knew they didn't want to read that sort of thing. That sentence to have death at all times before you struck me deeply. And then when the war was over”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember a situation in which one of our teachers gave us a homework and he said this is for next Thursday and the whole class burst out laughing next Thursday who knows what's next Thursday”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in the army, in the German army, but were not in camps. We had to live in the present moment, toilet moment. And when you live in the present moment, you are all there. That's where the stop brings you. Then you can look and you can do from that moment.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When everything is so uncertain and when the bombs are falling left and right and you don't even know whether your house is by no means whether your house is going to be... Yeah, there were many times.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Common sense. It makes sense. It has to do with the senses, with all our senses, and it is common to all. And it leads to awareness that we are all one.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you need As never before. There is a beautiful story from the mystical tradition in Judaism where one great master prays, oh God, make me like Abraham. And the voice comes from heaven and says, I've already got one, Abraham. I want you in your uniqueness”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that, for life, life, or mystery, and if you are sure that you are using the word God correctly, you could even call it God, but there are so many misunderstandings. So I call it life. Everybody knows would be mean by that. It's very mysterious. You cannot analyze it. You cannot grasp it, but you can understand it if you give yourself to it, if you let it take hold of you. And life... Offers you things very different from any other person. There has never been another person that had exactly semantic this time in history that makes a great difference. And all these things makes you a very, very unique. And this uniqueness is your calling to live it to the full, that uniqueness. It's like a role that we are given, you see. When I say we all belong together, that is our self.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But it's difficult to become aware of it. I think everybody has a calling. I speak of life, it's that great mystery that we confront as human beings. Life.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where can we find common ground? But it also means that in those aspects in which your enemies quotation marks because usually when you say enemies you think you hate them. They are my enemies. I can't help it. They are my enemies. And I will do everything possible to protect the animals.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the aspects of loving your enemies is that you listen to them, you listen to what are they saying, and then you say maybe they are right for a moment, you must say maybe they are right and not I. So you check what your opinion is against their opinion. Right. That's already a step forward. Then you look at the issue. That is would be the real thing. Let's together look at the issue and not have our preconceived notions. So you're trying to get your enemies to look at the issues, not at their position.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, you have to say what do you mean by love. And the one definition, if you are, sort of working definition of any kind of love, there's so many kinds of love, love of your spouse, love of your friend, love of your animals, love of your country. What all of them have together is I say, yes, we belong together. Yes to belonging. Love is a yes to belonging that is not only said with your mouth, but with your whole being and lived, yes to belong, existential yes.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and that is what a concept. That's what we have to learn today. And I put emphasis on the fact that it remains the enemy because if suddenly they became your friends, you would love your friends, but not your enemies. They remain your enemies, but you love them.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and they are afraid of one another, that the other one would get ahead. So you get competition and rivalry. And then you get greed because people think, oh, there's not enough. Again, fear, fear that there's not enough. And if you fear that there's not enough, you want to get as much as possible for yourself. Exactly the opposite is when you trust life because then you are not fearful instead of violence, non-violence, peace. That is exactly the world all of us want, the world of peace, of cooperation and of sharing.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And then the sphere builds this pyramid because the one that is a little higher up than the others is fearful that somebody else might get there and so uses violence to oppress the others. There is already oppression. So we see.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is the social life, the form that we give our social life if we are fearful. And those are the two possibilities to life, either to trust life or to be fearful of life. Fearfulness makes you violent and the root of violence is fearfulness.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So stop, look, go. Those are the three necessary steps that have to be repeated over and over to really come alive. That is really the happiness that we all long for, to be alive on all levels, on the physical level, on mental level, emotional level, and on the spiritual level.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, you have to stop because we are in such a vast lane in life, most of us, whether we want it or not, life is so fast these days. So we are really rushed along and we don't see the opportunity. Life offices moment by moment opportunity. So have to stop and get into the present moment. Our shared friend Ethole, yes, has really taught people that. You have to stop long enough to be present. And then you can listen, look, smell, if necessary, whatever, what is now the opportunity that life offers me at this moment. And then that is the look, and then go and grab it, do something with it when it comes to enjoyment. Enjoy the moment really. Don't just say nice flowers and go on to something else, but look at the flowers. Let them impress you.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the point because you have experience in the past and you can see it when you look at the past. But when you look at the future, you can't see it. That's what makes it so difficult. And then you need that trust. Even though I don't see it, I trust that life will give me good things.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too quickly say, Well, yes, you should trust in life and I would be very careful. But it's the only thing that you can say. And you ask, how can I prove that life is worth trusting? If you know the person well enough and can really speak from heart to heart, that's also necessary. But you can make them look back. Life giving. If you look back on your life, you see situations and times when everything seemed to be just terrible, terrible catastrophe. And now out of this catastrophe, not in spite of it, even because of it. You got where you are, and that is so encouraging, but you see mostly when you look in the rear mirror, so to say, you see looking back. And when you look forward, you can't see it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in the difficult situation.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can withhold that trust or we can give it. And if we withhold it, we can try it for a little while, but everything goes wrong.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you share this with our viewers? I think hope is something very different from our hopes. I think that's so important because the hopes are always something that we can imagine. You can't hope for it unless you can imagine it, but hope in this truly spiritual sense is openness for surprise for that which you cannot real hope.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have the opportunity to stretch even further than people had to stretch themselves before to understand one another, to listen to one another.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and that is quite a different opportunity from enjoying things. But it is also a gift and a great gift that in a time and in a place is the whole world today where everything is torn and everything. Torn and broken.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly that you have legs, you notice when you break a leg or when you have some difficult. No, at the hard times. That is enjoyment. That is the opportunity to enjoy.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to ask what are you really grateful for? And there it's important to realize you're not grateful for what happens at this moment necessarily because it may be something for which you cannot be grateful if you get news that your dearest friend has just died. There are many or if you're just faced on the news with oppression and exploitation and misery and violence, you can be grateful for that. But at every moment life gives you the opportunity to do something with what life gives you. And therefore, grateful living means learning to avail yourself moment by moment of that opportunity. And that most of the time it's the opportunity to enjoy. Everyone really has to help people realize that 99% of the time we could enjoy and we can enjoy that we have eyes and ideas to hear everything.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because when you speak about gratitude, people often think, oh, yeah, when something nice happens, then of course I'm grateful. But grateful living is to be grateful at all times, at all times, no matter what happens. And that means reaping the joy that comes from gratefulness at all times, also in the midst of suffering.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Just a way of being. It's a way of being, but the practice is your way of being. It's a way of living. That's why lately I talked less about gratitude, but more about grateful living.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are well aware that happiness just doesn't last. Happiness never cannot last. So we have to find the happiness that lasts. And that happiness I call joy. And we can't find that because we can find that joy even in the midst of unhappiness.”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yearning is basically, I think, all humans would agree to be happy, to be happy, to be joyful. And I make a little distinction between happy and joyful because we say we want to be happy, but we want to be happy with the happiness that lasts”
2025-03-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Brother David Steindl-Rast: Happiness Begins with Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source