Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life Quotes

“Nursing a grudge only perpetuates the offender’s power over you. He continues to live in your head, reinforcing your frustration, polluting your imagination with thoughts of getting even. Don’t let him get away with that. He may or may not deserve forgiveness, but you deserve better than to waste your energy being angry at him. Letting go is the best revenge. Forgiveness is the identifying marker of the stronger party to the dispute. It is truly a favor you do yourself, not an undeserved gesture to the person who hurt you. Be kind to yourself and forgive.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact. Boorish people are blessed with athletic or musical skills that qualify them to earn more money in a year than many of us will earn in our lifetime. Saintly people are struck down by disease before they can use their gifts to help others. The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God’s inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don’t get what they deserve.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“I find God not in the tests that life imposes on us but in the ability of ordinary people to rise to the challenge, to find within themselves qualities of soul, qualities of courage they did not know they had until the day they needed them. God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away. Let”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“I will criticize individuals when they deserve criticism, but I will not condemn entire populations. We have seen where that leads.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“We can reject the literal notion of Hell along the lines of Dante’s Inferno, an actual location where bad people are punished for their sins. We can dismiss that as naive. But, calling on ‘second naïveté' can we believe that there are some things a person might do during his lifetime, the memory of which will haunt him for the rest of his days and make it hard for him to feel good about the kind of person he is? Can we believe that there are some moments in our lives that we can look back on, opportunities we missed that never came our way again, and bear the consequences of having missed that opportunity for as long as we live? ‘What might have been’ is a pretty good definition of Hell.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“My interactions with troubled or angry congregants have involved less explaining and more hand-holding. I have more than once paid a condolence call on a family to whom something so awful had happened that words
seemed inadequate. So I didn’t offer words, beyond ‘I’m sorry, I feel so bad for you.’ I would often sit quietly with the grieving widow or parent for several minutes, and when I would get up to go, the mourner would throw her arms around me and say, ‘Thank you for being here with us.’ My presence represented God’s caring presence, the symbolic statement that God had not abandoned them. That reassurance, more than any theological wisdom, was what I was uniquely qualified to offer them.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“I’m sorry, but I choose to believe that any God worth worshipping would say, “I really don’t need you to be My press agent. I need you to bring solace and comfort to My bleeding children on earth.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“My list of the worst offenses against God would begin with hurting another person, cheating another person, shaming another person.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“when you are able to forgive yourself and to forgive people around you for not being perfect, I will recognize you as My child.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“God is a God I can believe in.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“What might have been” is a pretty good definition of Hell.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“was able to see God not as the source of our anguish but as the source of our ability to cope with it, to love and to comfort and to enjoy and ultimately to grieve for a very special child.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“find God in the willingness of so many people to do the right thing, even when the right thing is difficult, expensive, or unappreciated, and to reject the wrong thing no matter how tempting or profitable.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God’s inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don’t get what they deserve.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“through the lives and souls of specific individuals. The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“observant but not compulsive” and the absence of a belief in a God who would punish us for disobedience would go on to become cornerstones of my personal and professional life.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life

“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.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life