111 Quotes by Harold S. Kushner

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them.