Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Bruce Feiler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Bruce Feiler.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
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.
After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.
Moses is our true founding father.
'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.
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.
Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives.
Moses became America's true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.
Religion is increasingly a woman's domain in America.
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.
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.
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.
Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Don't forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.
I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.
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.
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?
Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.
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.
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.
Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.
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.
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.
I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.
One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day.
Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility.
The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors - science, capitalism, consumerism.
The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.
The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.
Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.
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.
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.
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.
Happy families do have certain things in common. Today we finally have the knowledge to know what those things are.
I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.
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.
Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.
Even Superman's name reflects his creators' biblical knowledge.
There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.
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.'
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.
The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.
Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges, you write a new chapter in your story together. Love is the constant act of revising and retelling your own story in real time. You don't do it by yourself. You do it with someone else. The only way you do that is to talk to each other and create a shared narrative.
When you hit the unimaginable, the only answer is imaginativeness. You have to heal with the person that you're suffering with. You have to write a new chapter in your story. A relationship can be a sacred thing, but it's going to be difficult. There are going to be challenges. You are going to have pain. But working it through and being resilient is as sacred and meaningful as having a "Hollywood" romance.
The key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves. ... It works in software, and it turns out that it works with kids.
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.
The higher the joy is not the light, it's the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it's handing down
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.
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.
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.
There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do.
The biggest idea that I have learned - I basically went in to write a book about Adam and Eve, ended up writing a book about love. And what did I learn? Love is a story you tell with another person.
Love is a balance between independence and interdependence. In love, you want to be independent and interdependent. You want to be a little bit selfish and a little bit selfless. Love can be an antidote to loneliness, as long as there is some aloneness in it.
One of the things I've learned is to be much more open about my frailties and about our failures, because when you show your kids how you can resolve conflict in your life in real time, you're giving them confidence that when they have conflicts, they can push through them.
One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’
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