Harold S. Kushner Quotes

#1. We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.

Harold S. Kushner

#2. If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul

Harold S. Kushner

#3. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#4. Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.

Harold S. Kushner

#5. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#6. What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.

Harold S. Kushner

#7. To be a husband or wife, to be a parent, is inevitably to be aware of so many disappointing, exasperating things about your mate or child, but at the same time to see those people in depth, to see them with both eyes, and to be reminded of why you still love them.

Harold S. Kushner

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.

Harold S. Kushner

#11. Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery.

Harold S. Kushner

#12. But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.

Harold S. Kushner

#13. This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

Harold S. Kushner

#14. When he thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden [Moses]. When he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things.

Harold S. Kushner

#15. Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)

Harold S. Kushner

#16. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#17. 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

#18. About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.

Harold S. Kushner

#19. There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.

Harold S. Kushner

#20. My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God.

Harold S. Kushner

#21. There is no right way to do a wrong thing.

Harold S. Kushner

#22. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#23. The idea is to find some bit of holiness in everything-food, sex, earning and spending money, having children, conversations with friends. Everything can be seen as a miracle, as part of God's plan. When we can truly see this, we nourish our souls.

Harold S. Kushner

#24. We are here to finish God's labors ... so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.

Harold S. Kushner

#25. Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others.

Harold S. Kushner

#26. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational
feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything
that happens in the world is our doin

Harold S. Kushner

#27. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#28. 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?

Harold S. Kushner

#29. For all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion.

Harold S. Kushner

#30. No good deed ever goes wasted.

Harold S. Kushner

#31. God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

Harold S. Kushner

#32. We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.

Harold S. Kushner

#33. One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.

Harold S. Kushner

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.

Harold S. Kushner

#37. Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

Harold S. Kushner

#38. We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.

Harold S. Kushner

#39. Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are

Harold S. Kushner

#40. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#41. Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.

Harold S. Kushner

#42. 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 S. Kushner

#43. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#44. 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

#45. Why bad things happen to good people

Harold S. Kushner

#46. Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.

Harold S. Kushner

#47. The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.

Harold S. Kushner

#48. 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

#49. We not only have today; we have all the yesterdays we are capable of remembering and all the tomorrows we can envision.

Harold S. Kushner

#50. One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.

Harold S. Kushner

#51. Sometimes, if we can't find another person to dump our anger on, we turn it on ourselves. The textbook definition of depression is anger turned inward instead of being discharged outward.

Harold S. Kushner

#52. 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

#53. When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world.

Harold S. Kushner

#54. Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for.

Harold S. Kushner

#55. We do ourselves and others a disservice when we make old age something to be feared ... The longer we live, the more life we possess.

Harold S. Kushner

#56. The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without
raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

Harold S. Kushner

#57. Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy ... may be the surest proof of all of God's reality.

Harold S. Kushner

#58. History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win.

Harold S. Kushner

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Several recent authors have written of "the imposter phenomenon," describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are.

Harold S. Kushner

#62. That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.

Harold S. Kushner

#63. We can do our best to change people, to summon them to be whom they are capable of being, but ultimately they only people we will always have the power to change will be ourselves.

Harold S. Kushner

#64. The small choices and decisions we make a hundred times a day add up to determining the kind of world we live in.

Harold S. Kushner

#65. LIFE" made it possible, "DEATH" made it necessary!

Harold S. Kushner

#66. Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.

Harold S. Kushner

#67. Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.

Harold S. Kushner

#68. In that way, we Jews can see Christianity as God's chosen instrument for redeeming the world from paganism, and Christians can recognize their obligation to preach the message of Christianity to the world, but not to the Jewish people, who had that message before they did.

Harold S. Kushner

#69. Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly.

Harold S. Kushner

#70. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#71. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#72. When Moses says, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" God answers not by telling Moses who he is, but by telling him who God is, saying, "I will be with you" (Exodus 3:12)

Harold S. Kushner

#73. The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them.

Harold S. Kushner

#74. I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.

Harold S. Kushner

#75. If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference.

Harold S. Kushner

#76. 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

#77. I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

Harold S. Kushner

#78. Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone.

Harold S. Kushner

#79. The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him.

Harold S. Kushner

#80. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#81. God's job is not to make sick people healthy. That's the doctor's job. God's job is to make sick people brave.

Harold S. Kushner

#82. Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself.

Harold S. Kushner

#83. Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.

Harold S. Kushner

#84. For Judaism, sin is a deed, not a condition.

Harold S. Kushner

#85. I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enough

Harold S. Kushner

#86. True success consists not in becoming the person you dreamed of being when you were young, but in becoming the person you were meant to be, the person you are capable of being when you are at your best.

Harold S. Kushner

#87. That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

Harold S. Kushner

#88. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#89. God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.

Harold S. Kushner

#90. I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.

Harold S. Kushner

#91. Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

Harold S. Kushner

#92. 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.

Harold S. Kushner

#93. Only a life of goodness and honesty leaves us feeling spiritually healthy and human.

Harold S. Kushner

#94. We are the messiah for somebody if not for everybody.

Harold S. Kushner

#95. A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge.

Harold S. Kushner

#96. We tend to take on the coloration of the setting in which we find ourselves.

Harold S. Kushner

#97. When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.

Harold S. Kushner

#98. For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain.

Harold S. Kushner

#99. We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be.

Harold S. Kushner

#100. 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.

Harold S. Kushner