Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Harold S. Kushner - Page 2

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

It is because you have the typical American habit of seeing everything as a test. You see the mountain as your enemy and you set out to defeat it. So, naturally, the mountain fights back and it is stronger than you are. We do not see the mountain as our enemy to be conquered. The purpose of our climb is to become one with the mountain and so it lifts us up and carries us along.

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

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

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

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

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

There seems to be something in the human soul that causes us to think less of ourselves every time we do something wrong... And maybe it is good for us to feel that way. It may make us more sensitive to what we do wrong and move us to repent and grow.

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

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

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

Sometimes we are simply "blown away" and in awe by finding ourselves in the presence of God. Other times, however, even when we are participating in acts of kindness-complimenting others, writing a check to charity, donating time to a good cause-we are oblivious to the miracle of what is happening at that moment.

Why 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.

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.

No good deed ever goes wasted.

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.

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.

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

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.

I wish i spent more time at the office.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A personal relationship with God enhances life. First, it enables us to accept our limitations without being frustrated by them. It assures us that problems we can't solve are not necessarily insoluble. Second, when we need it, God offers us a sense of forgiveness, a sense of cleansing from our incompleteness. . . . Last and perhaps most important, a personal relationship with God redeems us from the fear of death. We needn't be afraid that all our good deeds will vanish when we die.

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.

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.

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.

Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them.