Bruce Feiler Quotes & Sayings

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.
— Bruce Feiler

The simplest consequence of walking on crutches is that you walk slower. Every step must be a necessary one. When you hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. When you go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with a community you've built along the way. — Bruce Feiler

Fathers can find great inspiration in faith. — Bruce Feiler

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast. — Bruce Feiler

The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can't the people who are descendants of the Bible be in dialogue with other cultures? — Bruce Feiler

Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn't mean simply 'talking through problems,' as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves. — Bruce Feiler

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative. — Bruce Feiler

If you always read books, you'll always be happy. — Bruce Feiler

Don't forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope. — Bruce Feiler

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence. — Bruce Feiler

The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps. — Bruce Feiler

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. — Bruce Feiler

I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants. — Bruce Feiler

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book. — Bruce Feiler

The higher the joy is not the light, it's the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it's handing down — Bruce Feiler

Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around - it's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. [But] reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing. — Bruce Feiler

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front. — Bruce Feiler

It's like they say in the Internet world - if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. — Bruce Feiler

The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet. — Bruce Feiler

Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility. — Bruce Feiler

There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do. — Bruce Feiler

You may be frustrated with religion, but don't take that out on God. — Bruce Feiler

You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins. — Bruce Feiler

Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too. — Bruce Feiler

There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope. — Bruce Feiler

Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives. — Bruce Feiler

If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt. — Bruce Feiler

Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome. — Bruce Feiler

Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god. — Bruce Feiler

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era. — Bruce Feiler

Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him. — Bruce Feiler

Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works. — Bruce Feiler

Their (Council of Dads) wisdom reads like a psalmbook of living:
Approach the cow
Pack your flip-flops
Don't see the wall
Tend your tadpoles
Live the questions
Harvest miracles
Always learn to juggle on the side of a hill
Take a walk with a turtle — Bruce Feiler

I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand. — Bruce Feiler

Religion is increasingly a woman's domain in America. — Bruce Feiler

In his work as a management consultant, Covey often asked his corporate clients to write a one-sentence answer to the question What is this organization's essential mission or purpose and what is its main strategy to accomplish that? — Bruce Feiler

No one aspires to be the person who handles this kind of situation well. And we don't always handle it well. — Bruce Feiler

I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was ... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools. — Bruce Feiler

Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't. — Bruce Feiler

Moses became America's true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty. — Bruce Feiler

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic. — Bruce Feiler

Create a safe zone. Every parent quickly learns that every child - and every adult - handles conflict differently. Some push back when criticized, some turn inward, some break down in tears. — Bruce Feiler

Happy families do have certain things in common. Today we finally have the knowledge to know what those things are. — Bruce Feiler

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed. — Bruce Feiler

It is our responsibility to find God in someone who is different from us. I think that God basically says, 'I created diversity on purpose, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to make it work.' — Bruce Feiler

One of the things that happens in the world is that people try to avoid conflict. Whereas in the home, you can't. You'll end up getting divorced or becoming estranged from your kids. Keep in mind, the hardest part of any negotiation is agreeing to start it. Once you've gotten past that emotional barrier, the solutions usually present themselves. — Bruce Feiler

Nd you will have many opportunities to take in human civilization at its highest levels of achievement..approach this experience as a small child might approach a mud puddle. You can lean over and look at yourself in the reflection, maybe stick a finger in it, an cause a little ripple. Or you can dive in, thrash around, and find out what it feels like, what it tastes like ... I urge you to jump in. And I look forward to seeing you, back here, at the end of this experience, covered in mud. — Bruce Feiler

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day. — Bruce Feiler

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed. — Bruce Feiler

All couples have been told to schedule regular one-on-one time. 'Date night' is the default answer to most problems in modern marriages. And research backs this up. — Bruce Feiler

Moses is our true founding father. — Bruce Feiler

Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive. — Bruce Feiler

I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused. — Bruce Feiler

Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause. — Bruce Feiler

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people. — Bruce Feiler

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story. — Bruce Feiler

My name is Bruce Feiler, and I'm an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It's the incurable desire to tell, shape, share, occasionally exaggerate, often elongate, and inevitably bungle a good story. — Bruce Feiler

After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan. — Bruce Feiler

A recent wave of research shows that children who eat dinner with their families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and develop eating disorders. Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem. — Bruce Feiler

May your first word be adventure and last word love. — Bruce Feiler

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us? — Bruce Feiler

'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. — Bruce Feiler

I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection. — Bruce Feiler

American culture really has two souls. And it's not a question of whether the culture becomes secularized. The culture never becomes one thing or the other. The culture is always two. The culture is always William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards. The culture is always Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. America was born just in time to have two mentalities. We're like Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb. Secular people want to believe that we are a nation of the Enlightenment, and because of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution that secularism will supersede religion. Religious people want to believe that through the revival religion will supersede secularism. And both are wrong. "What's going to happen," he said, "is that there will continue to be a constant dynamic and tension between the two, running side by side.And they're going to keep on being about that for as long as there's an American identity worth talking about. — Bruce Feiler

In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God ... If that spirit is life, then I found life ... If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three ... all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew. — Bruce Feiler

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations. — Bruce Feiler

Even Superman's name reflects his creators' biblical knowledge. — Bruce Feiler

Anybody can dream an impossible dream. But only a few find a dream that's possible. — Bruce Feiler

The key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves ... It works in software, and it turns out that it works with kids. — Bruce Feiler

We no longer just take religious identity from our parents, so what's going on? Why are people going to this series, why are people reading so many books about religion? It's because they want answers. The answers are no longer just passed down from generation to generation. It's harder for people. In effect, you have to roll up your sleeve and ask the questions. But if you do it, if you forge your own identity, it can be much more personal and much more meaningful to you. — Bruce Feiler

Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives. — Bruce Feiler