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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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Harold S. Kushner
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More quotes by Harold S. Kushner
No good deed ever goes wasted.
Harold S. Kushner
Only a life of goodness and honesty leaves us feeling spiritually healthy and human.
Harold S. Kushner
Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.
Harold S. Kushner
We can endure much more than we think we can all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don't deny it, don't be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there.
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Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.
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The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them.
Harold S. Kushner
Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.
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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.
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Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for.
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That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.
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What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.
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But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know, we can reenter paradise.
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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.
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Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so there is no longer a split in the soul ... For the person of integrity, life may not be easy but it is simple: Figure out what is right and do it. All other considerations come in second.
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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.
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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.
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One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Harold S. Kushner
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 office
Harold S. Kushner