Harold S. Kushner Quotes - Page 3

Our inability to see the beauty doesn't suggest in the slightest that beauty is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with broad enough perspective to see the beauty.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel.

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.

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

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?

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.

You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny.

God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

No good deed ever goes wasted.

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.

There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.

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.

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