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.
Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.
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.
Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.
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.
When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.
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.
You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny.
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.
God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.
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.
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.
No good deed ever goes wasted.
We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.
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?
God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.
You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists.
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.
The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.
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