Top 100 Harold S. Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Harold S. Kushner

Featured in: Integrity Quotes, Grace Quotes, Growth Quotes, Kindness Quotes, Humble Quotes

2. “There is no right way to do a wrong thing.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

Featured in: Positive Quotes for Women, Wellness Wednesday Quotes, Kindness Quotes, Have a Great Day Quotes, Friday Morning Quotes

4. “When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

6. “We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don’t deny it, don’t be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there.”

— Harold S. Kushner

7. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

8. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

Featured in: Recovery Quotes, Wellness Wednesday Quotes, Health Quotes

11. “You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.”

— Harold S. Kushner

12. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

13. “One man alone can’t defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

15. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

16. “Why bad things happen to good people.”

— Harold S. Kushner

17. “When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul.”

— Harold S. Kushner

18. “You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny.”

— Harold S. Kushner

19. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

20. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

21. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

22. “No good deed ever goes wasted.”

— Harold S. Kushner

23. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

24. “We have confused God with Santa Claus. And we believe that prayer means making a list of everything you don’t have but want and trying to persuade God you deserve it. Now I’m sorry, that’s not God, that’s Santa Claus.”

— Harold S. Kushner

25. “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?””

— Harold S. Kushner

26. “The happiest people I know are people who don’t even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.”

— Harold S. Kushner

27. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

28. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

29. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

31. “Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells – our hair, our fingernails – can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

33. “The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him.”

— Harold S. Kushner

34. “I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God’s creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.”

— Harold S. Kushner

35. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

36. “There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.”

— Harold S. Kushner

37. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

38. “The small choices and decisions we make a hundred times a day add up to determining the kind of world we live in.”

— Harold S. Kushner

39. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

40. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

41. “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?”

— Harold S. Kushner

42. “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 because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

44. “When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.”

— Harold S. Kushner

45. “Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God’s goodness.”

— Harold S. Kushner

46. “God does not send the problem; genetics, chance, and bad luck do that. And God cannot make the problem go away, no matter how many prayers and good deeds we offer. What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned. In.”

— Harold S. Kushner

47. “That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.”

— Harold S. Kushner

48. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

50. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner