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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 Kushner -
Do things for people not because for who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are.
Harold Kushner
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Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.
Harold Kushner -
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 Kushner -
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
Harold Kushner -
We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Harold Kushner -
To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wearing to keep the world from hurting us. We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love
Harold Kushner -
In our explorations of Ecclesiastes and of our own lives, we have identified three things: Belong to people Accept pain as part of your life Know that you have made a difference
Harold Kushner
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It isn’t God’s job to make sick people healthy. That’s the doctors’ job. God’s job is to make sick people brave, and in my experience, that’s something God does really well. Prayer, as I understand it, is not a matter of begging or bargaining. It is the act of inviting God into our lives so that, with God’s help, we will be strong enough to resist temptation and resilient enough not to be destroyed by life’s unfairness.
Harold Kushner -
Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.
Harold Kushner -
The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact. Boorish people are blessed with athletic or musical skills that qualify them to earn more money in a year than many of us will earn in our lifetime. Saintly people are struck down by disease before they can use their gifts to help others. The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God’s inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don’t get what they deserve.
Harold Kushner