Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life
Harold S. Kushner
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I will criticize individuals when they deserve criticism, but I will not condemn entire populations. We have seen where that leads.”
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Book Keywords:
mourning, unfairness-of-life, rumi, revenge, god, existence-of-god, death, suffering, forgiveness, hell, grudges
