Harold S. Kushner
One of the sages of the Talmud taught nearly 200 years ago that God could have created a plant that would grow loaves of bread. Instead He created wheat for us to mill and bake into bread. Why? So that we could be HIs partners in completing the work of creation.Collection: Work
God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.Collection: People
I said in an interview at the time that God's job is not to make sick people healthy. That's the doctors' job. God's job is to make sick people brave.Collection: God
We do ourselves and others a disservice when we make old age something to be feared...The longer we live, the more life we possess.Collection: Inspirational Life
What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.Collection: Time
Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less.Collection: God
Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.Collection: Party
In all my years of counselling those near death, I've yet to hear anyone say they wish they had spent more time at the officeCollection: Years
We have confused God with Santa Claus. And we believe that prayer means making a list of everything you don't have but want and trying to persuade God you deserve it. Now I'm sorry, that's not God, that's Santa Claus.Collection: God
I am quite confident that the most important part of a human being is not his physical body but his nonphysical essence, which some people call soul and others, personality... The nonphysical part cannot die and cannot decay because it's not physical.Collection: Grieving
It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that we keep the world orderly and understandable.... But [this belief] has a number of serious limitations.... It teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt when there is no basis for guilt. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.Collection: Believe
I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enoughCollection: Perfect
I suspect that the happiest people you know are the ones who work at being kind, helpful and reliable - and happiness sneaks into their lives while they are busy doing those things. It is a by-product, never a primary goal.Collection: People
The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it.Collection: Giving
The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical - our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal.Collection: Memories
You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.Collection: Mans Search For Meaning
Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person.Collection: Love You
Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself.Collection: Charity
Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people brings happiness.Collection: Happiness
Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.Collection: Biblical
Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.Collection: Healing
Our inability to see the beauty doesn't suggest in the slightest that beauty is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with broad enough perspective to see the beauty.Collection: Inspiring
Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.Collection: People
Love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. Love is like a muscle; the more it is exercised today, the more it can be used tomorrow.Collection: Love Is
Everything that God created is potentially holy, and our task as humans is to find that holiness in seemingly unholy situations. When we can do this, we will have learned to nurture our souls.Collection: Soul
When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.Collection: Alternatives
I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending, that haunts our sleep so much as the fear that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.Collection: Fear
None of us has the power to make someone else love us. But we all have the power to give away love, to love other people. And if we do so, we change the kind of world we live in.Collection: Love
The idea is to find some bit of holiness in everything-food, sex, earning and spending money, having children, conversations with friends. Everything can be seen as a miracle, as part of God's plan. When we can truly see this, we nourish our souls.Collection: Sex
We pray to you, O God ... for strength, determination, and willpower, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish.Collection: Perseverance
When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel.Collection: Thank You
One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.Collection: Health
Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games, and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all.Collection: Baseball
Think about it: it is easy to see God's beauty in a glorious sunset or in ocean waves crashing on a beach. But can you find the holiness in a struggle for life?Collection: Beach
You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny.Collection: Destiny
God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.Collection: Thinking
If that were God's plan, it's a bad bargain; I don't want to have to deal with a God like that...My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of...and we care very much about each other.Collection: Couple
One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.Collection: Men
Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.Collection: Life
Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.Collection: Children
We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.Collection: Children
No good deed ever goes wasted.Collection: Deeds
Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.Collection: Teamwork
There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.Collection: Feelings
. . .We are here to finish God's labors. . .so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.Collection: Creation
It is because you have the typical American habit of seeing everything as a test. You see the mountain as your enemy and you set out to defeat it. So, naturally, the mountain fights back and it is stronger than you are. We do not see the mountain as our enemy to be conquered. The purpose of our climb is to become one with the mountain and so it lifts us up and carries us along.Collection: Fighting
A personal relationship with God enhances life. First, it enables us to accept our limitations without being frustrated by them. It assures us that problems we can't solve are not necessarily insoluble. Second, when we need it, God offers us a sense of forgiveness, a sense of cleansing from our incompleteness. . . . Last and perhaps most important, a personal relationship with God redeems us from the fear of death. We needn't be afraid that all our good deeds will vanish when we die.Collection: God