Harold S. Kushner Quotes
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.
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
Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are.
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?
We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.
What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.
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
God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
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.
You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.
We do ourselves and others a disservice when we make old age something to be feared...The longer we live, the more life we possess.
One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.
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.
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.
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.
Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people brings happiness.
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.
Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.
Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.
Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less.
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.
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.
One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.
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.
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
The small choices and decisions we make a hundred times a day add up to determining the kind of world we live in.
We pray to you, O God ... for strength, determination, and willpower, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish.
There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.
We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.
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 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.
. . .We are here to finish God's labors. . .so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.
You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
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.
God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.
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.
God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.
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.
