You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.
Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.
Given the unfairness that strikes so many people in life, I would rather believe in a God of limited power and unlimited love and justice, rather than the other way around.
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.
Our inability to see the beauty doesn’t suggest in the slightest that beauty is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with broad enough perspective to see the beauty.
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.
Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people brings happiness.
People are so busy chasing happiness- if they would slow down and turn around, they would give it a chance to catch up with them.
When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world.
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.
One man alone can’t defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.
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.
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.
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.
Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.
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 we put our soul into our work, if, rather than just going through the motions, what we do flows from the deepest part of our being, then after a burst of creativity, we need to replenish our souls.
There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.
We don’t have to be afraid of dying because it’s not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived.