Bruce Feiler Quotes & Sayings

#1. 'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Bruce Feiler

#2. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.

Bruce Feiler

#3. After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

Bruce Feiler

#4. You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.

Bruce Feiler

#5. The simplest consequence of walking on crutches is that you walk slower. Every step must be a necessary one. When you hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. When you go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with a community you've built along the way.

Bruce Feiler

#6. Don't forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.

Bruce Feiler

#7. Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.

Bruce Feiler

#8. Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

Bruce Feiler

#9. Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.

Bruce Feiler

#10. The higher the joy is not the light, it's the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it's handing down

Bruce Feiler

#11. No one aspires to be the person who handles this kind of situation well. And we don't always handle it well.

Bruce Feiler

#12. One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

Bruce Feiler

#13. My name is Bruce Feiler, and I'm an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It's the incurable desire to tell, shape, share, occasionally exaggerate, often elongate, and inevitably bungle a good story.

Bruce Feiler

#14. The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can't the people who are descendants of the Bible be in dialogue with other cultures?

Bruce Feiler

#15. If you always read books, you'll always be happy.

Bruce Feiler

#16. May your first word be adventure and last word love.

Bruce Feiler

#17. Even Superman's name reflects his creators' biblical knowledge.

Bruce Feiler

#18. Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives.

Bruce Feiler

#19. I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Bruce Feiler

#20. When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.

Bruce Feiler

#21. There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

Bruce Feiler

#22. Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.

Bruce Feiler

#23. I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.

Bruce Feiler

#24. The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.

Bruce Feiler

#25. Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works.

Bruce Feiler

#26. Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't.

Bruce Feiler

#27. Happy families do have certain things in common. Today we finally have the knowledge to know what those things are.

Bruce Feiler

#28. Moses became America's true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.

Bruce Feiler

#29. I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was ... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.

Bruce Feiler

#30. Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.

Bruce Feiler

#31. It is our responsibility to find God in someone who is different from us. I think that God basically says, 'I created diversity on purpose, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to make it work.'

Bruce Feiler

#32. If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.

Bruce Feiler

#33. Moses is our true founding father.

Bruce Feiler

#34. Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.

Bruce Feiler

#35. Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.

Bruce Feiler

#36. The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

Bruce Feiler

#37. I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed.

Bruce Feiler

#38. Anybody can dream an impossible dream. But only a few find a dream that's possible.

Bruce Feiler

#39. The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.

Bruce Feiler

#40. Their (Council of Dads) wisdom reads like a psalmbook of living:
Approach the cow
Pack your flip-flops
Don't see the wall
Tend your tadpoles
Live the questions
Harvest miracles
Always learn to juggle on the side of a hill
Take a walk with a turtle

Bruce Feiler

#41. All couples have been told to schedule regular one-on-one time. 'Date night' is the default answer to most problems in modern marriages. And research backs this up.

Bruce Feiler

#42. Religion is increasingly a woman's domain in America.

Bruce Feiler

#43. After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.

Bruce Feiler

#44. It's like they say in the Internet world - if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that.

Bruce Feiler

#45. In his work as a management consultant, Covey often asked his corporate clients to write a one-sentence answer to the question What is this organization's essential mission or purpose and what is its main strategy to accomplish that?

Bruce Feiler

#46. Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.

Bruce Feiler

#47. Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.

Bruce Feiler

#48. You may be frustrated with religion, but don't take that out on God.

Bruce Feiler

#49. I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.

Bruce Feiler

#50. Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.

Bruce Feiler

#51. I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.

Bruce Feiler

#52. Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn't mean simply 'talking through problems,' as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.

Bruce Feiler

#53. But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.

Bruce Feiler

#54. Create a safe zone. Every parent quickly learns that every child - and every adult - handles conflict differently. Some push back when criticized, some turn inward, some break down in tears.

Bruce Feiler

#55. I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.

Bruce Feiler

#56. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around - it's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. [But] reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing.

Bruce Feiler