Top 60 Bruce Feiler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The messy middle is all about what happens when we’re in the state of in between. It involves a complicated alchemy of giving up old ways and experimenting with new ones, moving beyond what’s past and beginning to define what’s coming. In butterfly-speak, it’s cocooning; in hero-speak, it’s getting lost.”

— Bruce Feiler

2. “Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.”

— Bruce Feiler

3. “You don’t need a grand plan, you don’t need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.”

— Bruce Feiler

4. “Don’t forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.”

— Bruce Feiler

5. “Moses became Americas true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.”

— Bruce Feiler

6. “May your first word be adventure and last word love.”

— Bruce Feiler

7. “Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child’s emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.”

— Bruce Feiler

8. “Superman’s original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father’s name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.”

— Bruce Feiler

9. “Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to – but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.”

— Bruce Feiler

10. “One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’”

— Bruce Feiler

11. “Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.”

— Bruce Feiler

12. “Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.”

— Bruce Feiler

13. “The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.”

— Bruce Feiler

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

14. “The A is agency – autonomy, freedom, creativity, mastery; the belief that you can impact the world around you. The B is belonging – relationships, community, friends, family; the people that surround and nurture you. The C is cause – a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose; a transcendent commitment beyond yourself that makes your life worthwhile.”

— Bruce Feiler

15. “The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.”

— Bruce Feiler

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.”

— Bruce Feiler

17. “If you tell your own story to your children – that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them – you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they’ve felt.”

— Bruce Feiler

18. “My name is Bruce Feiler, and I’m an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It’s the incurable desire to tell, shape, share, occasionally exaggerate, often elongate, and inevitably bungle a good story.”

— Bruce Feiler

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

19. “After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.”

— Bruce Feiler

Featured in: Strong Quotes

20. “Jung called this practice counterbalancing one-sidedness. Our lives become too tilted toward one aspect of our identity and too tilted away from others. We’re all familiar with these scenarios. We become so obsessed with our work we neglect our family; we become so consumed with caring for children we overlook ourselves; we become so focused on serving others we ignore our loved ones. The more purely one thing we are, the more in danger we are of overlooking other things.”

— Bruce Feiler

21. “Create a safe zone. Every parent quickly learns that every child – and every adult – handles conflict differently. Some push back when criticized, some turn inward, some break down in tears.”

— Bruce Feiler

22. “Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here’s a radical idea: Don’t.”

— Bruce Feiler

23. “Each of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives will unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit.”

— Bruce Feiler

24. “The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.”

— Bruce Feiler

25. “Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work in many of our lives.”

— Bruce Feiler

26. “There’s a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It’s a narrative of hope.”

— Bruce Feiler

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

27. “My definition: A transition is a vital period of adjustment, creativity, and rebirth that helps one find meaning after a major life disruption. But how do you enter this mysterious state? Does it happen inevitably or do you somehow have to decide? And if so, how do you do that?”

— Bruce Feiler

28. “Religion is increasingly a woman’s domain in America.”

— Bruce Feiler

29. “There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do.”

— Bruce Feiler

30. “I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.”

— Bruce Feiler

31. “The higher the joy is not the light, it’s the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it’s handing down.”

— Bruce Feiler

32. “Here’s a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.”

— Bruce Feiler

33. “The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.”

— Bruce Feiler

34. “When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.”

— Bruce Feiler

35. “One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?”

— Bruce Feiler

36. “You may be frustrated with religion, but don’t take that out on God.”

— Bruce Feiler

37. “Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we’re thrown when they don’t. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities... We’re all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.”

— Bruce Feiler

38. “Every story, the moment it’s written down, will be reread,” she said. “And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.”

— Bruce Feiler

39. “Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply ‘talking through problems,’ as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.”

— Bruce Feiler

40. “I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic – an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.”

— Bruce Feiler

41. “I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that’s where the action is – on the home front.”

— Bruce Feiler

42. “Moses is our true founding father.”

— Bruce Feiler

43. “Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story – are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer – matters a great deal. How you adapt that story – how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life – matters even more.”

— Bruce Feiler

44. “The most healthful narrative,” he continued, “is the third one.” It’s called the oscillating family narrative. We’ve had ups and downs in our family. Your grandfather was vice president of the bank, but his house burned down. Your aunt was the first girl to go to college, but she got breast cancer. Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions.”

— Bruce Feiler

45. “Just as people live life out of order, they go through transitions out of order. While some people experience these phases sequentially, others experience them in reverse; others start in the middle and work their way out. Some finish one stage before going on to a new one; others move on to a new phase, then double back to the one they thought they had finished. Many get stuck in one phase for a very long time.”

— Bruce Feiler

46. “One of the things I’ve learned is to be much more open about my frailties and about our failures, because when you show your kids how you can resolve conflict in your life in real time, you’re giving them confidence that when they have conflicts, they can push through them.”

— Bruce Feiler

47. “An autobiographical occasion is any moment when we are encouraged or obliged to reimagine who we are. It’s a narrative event, when our existing life story is altered or redirected in some way, forcing us to revisit our preexisting identity and modify it for our life going forward. And nearly everyone goes through such moments.”

— Bruce Feiler

48. “It’s like they say in the Internet world – if you’re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you’re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that.”

— Bruce Feiler

49. “But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.”

— Bruce Feiler

50. “A recent wave of research shows that children who eat dinner with their families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and develop eating disorders. Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem.”

— Bruce Feiler