Quotes from Harold S. Kushner

If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.

Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers, or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a real difference.

Any God worth worshipping should prefer honest anger to hypocritical praise.

To wish to forget the hope because it wasn't realized, to try to cleanse your mind of the beautiful dream because it didn't come true, is to miss out on lie altogether, because life is designed to be lived in an alternation of hours of sunlight and hours of darkness.

More than any other human problem, loneliness, the absence of meaningful human connection, drains the joy and the sense of purpose from our lives.

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be.

Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.

that we got what we deserved in life.

They had answers to all of their own questions, but no answer for mine.

We tend to think that for religion to work, for our prayers to be answered, we should get what we ask for. That is to say, we have confused God with Santa Claus. We think that prayer means giving God the list of things we want and assuring Him that we have been good girls and boys and deserve to get them, and if we haven't been good, the rules we broke were silly rules anyway.

The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. "When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them.

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

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human.

People are so busy chasing happiness- if they would slow down and turn around, they would give it a chance to catch up with them.

One of the basic needs of every human being is the need to be loved, to have our wishes and feelings taken seriously, to be validated as people who matter.

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?

There is no right way to do a wrong thing.

That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.

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

I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enough

If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul

God is the light shining in the midst of darkness, not to deny that there is darkness in the world but to reassure us that we do not have to be afraid of the darkness because darkness will always yield to light. As theologian David Griffin puts in, God is all-powerful, His power enables people to deal with events beyond their control and He gives us the strength to do those things because He is with us.

When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.

One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.