Top 100 Harold S. Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them.”

— Harold S. Kushner

52. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

54. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

56. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

57. “That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.”

— Harold S. Kushner

58. “I wish i spent more time at the office.”

— Harold S. Kushner

59. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

60. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

61. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

62. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

63. “When I talk to people who feel this emptiness and lack of fulfillment, I recommend they find a source of balance in their lives. I suggest they find a way to “give back” to the world in order to feel a sense of completeness...”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

66. “Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?”

— Harold S. Kushner

67. “Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others.”

— Harold S. Kushner

68. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

69. “The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

71. “There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.”

— Harold S. Kushner

72. “God’s role is not to make our lives easier, to make the hard things go away, or to do them for us. God’s role is to give us the vision to know what we need to do, to bless us with the qualities of soul that we will need in order to do them ourselves, no matter how hard they may be, and to accompany us on that journey.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

74. “Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone.”

— Harold S. Kushner

75. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

76. “What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.”

— Harold S. Kushner

77. “We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.”

— Harold S. Kushner

78. “I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.”

— Harold S. Kushner

79. “As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound.”

— Harold S. Kushner

80. “We tend to take on the coloration of the setting in which we find ourselves.”

— Harold S. Kushner

81. “If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life’s crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.”

— Harold S. Kushner

82. “I am not sure prayer puts us in touch with God the way many people think it does – that we approach God as a supplicant, a beggar asking for favors, or as a customer presenting Him with a shopping list and asking what it will cost. Prayer is not primarily a matter of asking God to change things. If we come to understand what prayer can and should be, and rid ourselves of some unrealistic expectations, we will be better able to call on prayer, and on God, when we need them most.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

84. “Think of it this way: no scientist has ever seen an electron, but all scientists agree that electrons exist. No physicist has ever seen a quark, but all physicists believe that quarks are real. Why? Because when they look into their microscopes, they see things happening that could only happen if quarks and electrons existed. I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.”

— Harold S. Kushner

85. “We totally misunderstand what it means to be alive when we think of our lives as time we can use in search of rewards and pleasure. Frantically and in growing frustration, we search through our days, our years, looking for the reward, for the success that will make our lives worthwhile, like the security guard looking through the trash in the wheelbarrow for something of value and all the while missing the obvious answer. When you have learned how to live, life itself is the reward.”

— Harold S. Kushner

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

— Harold S. Kushner

87. “If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person’s life has made a difference.”

— Harold S. Kushner

88. “Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery.”

— Harold S. Kushner

89. “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.”

— Harold S. Kushner

90. “A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge.”

— Harold S. Kushner

91. “When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.”

— Harold S. Kushner

92. “Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.”

— Harold S. Kushner

93. “I will criticize individuals when they deserve criticism, but I will not condemn entire populations. We have seen where that leads.”

— Harold S. Kushner

94. “Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.”

— Harold S. Kushner

95. “It isn’t God’s job to make sick people healthy. That’s the doctors’ job. God’s job is to make sick people brave, and in my experience, that’s something God does really well. Prayer, as I understand it, is not a matter of begging or bargaining. It is the act of inviting God into our lives so that, with God’s help, we will be strong enough to resist temptation and resilient enough not to be destroyed by life’s unfairness.”

— Harold S. Kushner

96. “What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned.”

— Harold S. Kushner

97. “Suffering comes to ennoble man, to purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons. In sum, the purpose of suffering is to repair that which is faulty in a man’s personality.”

— Harold S. Kushner

98. “In other words, Job is saying to God: If I am important enough for You to keep track of my every mistake and punish me for them, then am I not worth five minutes of Your time to tell me what I am being punished for? And if I am too insignificant to merit Your personal attention, then why am I important enough for You to measure out my punishment?”

— Harold S. Kushner

99. “I believe strongly that one of the primary goals of religion is to teach people to like themselves and feel good about themselves. All my experience has taught me that people who feel good about themselves will be more generous, more forgiving of others, less defensive about their mistakes, more assessable to change, and better able to cope with misfortune and adversity.”

— Harold S. Kushner

100. “Typically, if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one’s shelves.”

— Harold S. Kushner