Harold S. Kushner Quotes

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

In all my years of counselling those near death, I've yet to hear anyone say they wish they had spent more time at the office

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so there is no longer a split in the soul ... For the person of integrity, life may not be easy but it is simple: Figure out what is right and do it. All other considerations come in second.

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

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

Why bad things happen to good people

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.

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 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 that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know, we can reenter paradise.

At some of the darkest moments in my life, some people I thought of as friends deserted me-some because they cared about me and it hurt them to see me in pain; others because I reminded them of their own vulnerability, and that was more than they could handle. But real friends overcame their discomfort and came to sit with me. If they had not words to make me feel better, they sat in silence (much better than saying, "You'll get over it," or "It's not so bad; others have it worse") and I loved them for it.

One of the sages of the Talmud taught nearly 200 years ago that God could have created a plant that would grow loaves of bread. Instead He created wheat for us to mill and bake into bread. Why? So that we could be HIs partners in completing the work of creation.

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

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

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.

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

The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it.

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

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?"

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

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.

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

God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal. living in a world of inflexible natural laws. The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God's part. Because the tragedy is not God's will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.

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

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

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?

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 don't have to be afraid of dying because it's not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived.

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.

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.

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.