Harold Kushner Quotes

You know, as I get older, personal happiness is all about love. It's all about love. You know, how I'm loved and how I love my family and my husband. That to me is happiness, when I feel like I am loved and I have a place to love deeply. That to me is happiness.

The most important thing in the world is that you make yourself a loving person, because this is what you will be giving away.

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

To know you are among people whom you love, and who love you – that has made all the successes wonderful, much more wonderful than they'd have been anyway.

You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.

How can you learn unconditional love if you’re married to a woman who meets all your conditions?

Feel good about being someone who loves selflessly. I think someday you’ll find someone who loves you the exact same way.

To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.

True love is spelled G-I-V-E. It is not based on what you can get, but rooted in what you can give to the other person.

No one can do me any good by loving me; I have more love than I need or could do any good with; but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.

Love is the essence of a full and wonderful life.

There comes a point when you just love someone. Not because they're good, or bad, or anything really. You just love them. It doesn't mean you'll be together forever. It doesn't mean you won't hurt each other. It just mean you love them. Sometimes in spite of who they are, and sometimes because of who they are. And you know that they love you, sometimes because of who you are, and sometimes in spite of it.

My fast is, among other things, meant to qualify me for achieving that equal and selfless love.

Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.

There is yet another illusion, that it is important to be respectable, to be loved and appreciated, to be important. Many say we have a natural urge to be loved and appreciated, to belong. That’s false. Drop this illusion and you will find happiness. We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved.

We don't love to be loved in return; we love to love.

When I feel very loved, when I nurture and support people, my experience is deepened. I feel connected to a larger purpose and meaning.

Only love makes fruitful the soul.

To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.

Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.