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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

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There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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The happiest people I know are people who don't even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.
Harold S. Kushner
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When I talk to people who feel this emptiness and lack of fulfillment, I recommend they find a source of balance in their lives. I suggest they find a way to give back to the world in order to feel a sense of completeness.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul.
Harold S. Kushner
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It explains why people come home from work or school and immediately switch on the television. They are not interested in the program much of the time, they do not even know what is on. But they are desperate for the sound of another human voice in their lives
Harold S. Kushner
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I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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. . .We are here to finish God's labors. . .so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.
Harold S. Kushner
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No good deed ever goes wasted.
Harold S. Kushner
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God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.
Harold S. Kushner
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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.
Harold S. Kushner
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Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.
Harold S. Kushner
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What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.
Harold S. Kushner
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God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Harold S. Kushner
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When a mentally retarded child is born, the religious question we often ask is, Why does God let this happen? The better question to pose is to ask, What kind of community should we be so that mental retardation isn't a barrier to the enjoyment of one's full humanity?
Harold S. Kushner