Best 105 quotes of Harold S. Kushner on MyQuotes

Harold S. Kushner

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people brings happiness.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    Given the unfairness that strikes so many people in life, I would rather believe in a God of limited power and unlimited love and justice, rather than the other way around.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

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    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    I am quite confident that the most important part of a human being is not his physical body but his nonphysical essence, which some people call soul and others, personality... The nonphysical part cannot die and cannot decay because it's not physical.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    I said in an interview at the time that God's job is not to make sick people healthy. That's the doctors' job. God's job is to make sick people brave.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    I suspect that the happiest people you know are the ones who work at being kind, helpful and reliable - and happiness sneaks into their lives while they are busy doing those things. It is a by-product, never a primary goal.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that we keep the world orderly and understandable.... But [this belief] has a number of serious limitations.... It teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt when there is no basis for guilt. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    I wish i spent more time at the office.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    Love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. Love is like a muscle; the more it is exercised today, the more it can be used tomorrow.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.

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

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.

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    Harold S. Kushner

    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.