Harold S. Kushner

“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 forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.”

“(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, perhaps because fire liberates the energy hidden in a log of wood or a lump of coal just as God liberates the potential energy to do good things that is hidden in every human being, just as God will be the fire that burns within Moses, enabling him to do the great things he will go on to do, but not consuming him in the process.)”

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

“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 undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimateresult may be?”

“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 feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomesmeaningful and not just pointless empty suffering? How can we turn all the painful experiences of our lives into birth pangs or intogrowing pains?” We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have alot to say about what the suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter andenvious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of painmeaningful and others empty and destructive.”

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

“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, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.”

“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 of guilt makes people try to be better. But anexcessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem andperhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.”

“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 gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of...and we care very much about each other.”