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.
When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.
One of the basic needs of every human being is the need to be loved, to have our wishes and feelings taken seriously, to be validated as people who matter.
Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.
We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
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.
Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.
God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.
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.
No good deed ever goes wasted.
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.
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.
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?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
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.
The small choices and decisions we make a hundred times a day add up to determining the kind of world we live in.
The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.
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.
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.
Only a life of goodness and honesty leaves us feeling spiritually healthy and human.