Quotes by Harold S. Kushner

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

“If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, wewould put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such u...”

“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cellsour hair, our fingernailscant feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When weunderstand that, our question will change from, Why do we have to feel...”

“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 g...”

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

“Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be...”

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

“(Many religions, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, use light and fire as symbols for the presence of God, perhaps because light, like God, cannot be seen but permits us to see everything there is, pe...”

“A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, isone of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense...”

“This is what it means to be human in the image of God. It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instinctswould tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, a...”

“This is what itmeans to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not makeup facts but orders facts; he sees connections b...”

“Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.”

“If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrationalfeeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbeha...”

“We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become b...”

“Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would beto forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach...”

“Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have woundsand scars of their own. They may even be envying us.”

“Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what the...”

“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When weunderstand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to ...”

“This is what it means to be human “in the image of God.” It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instinctswould tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good,...”