Harold S. Kushner > Quotes

“I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”
― Harold Kushner

“If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered,then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millenia, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how ful your life has been and how richly you are blessed. ”
― Rabbi Harold Kushner

“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

“Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

“Forgiveness is not a matter of exonerating people who have hurt you. They may not deserve exoneration. Forgiveness means cleansing your soul of the bitterness of ‘what might have been,’ ‘what should have been,’ and ‘what didn’t have to happen.’ Someone has defined forgiveness as ‘giving up all hope of having had a better past.’ What’s past is past and there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. There are perhaps no sadder people then the men and women who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments

“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, Living a Life That Matters : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

“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

“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

“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?”
― Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“There is no right way to do a wrong thing.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

“Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.”
― Harold Kushner

“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

“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, Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict between Conscience and Success

“I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enough”
― Harold S. Kushner

“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

“God is the light shining in the midst of darkness, not to deny that there is darkness in the world but to reassure us that we do not have to be afraid of the darkness because darkness will always yield to light. As theologian David Griffin puts in, God is all-powerful, His power enables people to deal with events beyond their control and He gives us the strength to do those things because He is with us.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments

“We can't pray that God make our lives free of problems; this won't happen, and it is probably just as well. We can't ask Him to make us and those we love immune to diseases, because He can't do that. We can't ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us.
People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.”
― Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God “sends” illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. “What did I do to deserve this?” is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is “If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?” As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”
― Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict between Conscience and Success

“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, Overcoming Life's Disappointments

“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, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“If that were God's plan, it's a bad bargain; I don't want to have to deal with a God like that...My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of...and we care very much about each other.”
― Harold Kushner

“One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

“God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.”
― Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

“We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us. ”
― Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

“We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war; For we know that You have made the world in a way That man must find his own path to peace Within himself and with his neighbor. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end starvation; For you have already given us the resources With which to feed the entire world If we would only use them wisely. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, To root out prejudice, For You have already given us eyes With which to see the good in all men If we would only use them rightly. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end despair, For You have already given us the power To clear away slums and to give hope If we would only use our power justly. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end disease, For you have already given us great minds with which To search out cures and healing, If we would only use them constructively. Therefore we pray to You instead, O God, For strength, determination, and willpower, To do instead of just to pray, To become instead of merely to wish. Jack Riemer, Likrat Shabbat”
― Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“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

“Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.”
― Harold S. Kushner

“Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will be at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it.”
― Rabbi Harold Kushner

“If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life's crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.”
― Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People