111 Quotes by Harold S. Kushner

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.

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

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 between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does notmake up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.

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.

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 misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everythingthat happens in the world is our doin

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

When he thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden [Moses]. When he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things.

To believe in God is not to affirm His existence. To believe in God means to trust God, to rely on God to be there for you when you are afflicted by despair, to light your path when you are uncertain as to what to do.

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, withoutraising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.