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Tuesdays with Morrie Quotes
However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe it all on accident.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn’t always pretty.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
.. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about ‘being human’ and ‘relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Have you found someone to share your heart with? Are you giving to your community? Are you at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
That was the end of his driving.. That was the end of his walking free.. That was the end of his privacy.. And that was the end of his secret.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity. Morrie, who could no longer dance, swim, bathe, or walk; Morrie, who could no longer answer his own door, dry himself after a shower, or even roll over in bed. How could he be so accepting? I watched him struggle with a fork, picking at a piece of tomato, missing it the first two times – a pathetic scene, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it so hard to think about dying?’Because, ‘ Morrie continued, ‘most of us walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.’And facing death changes all that?’Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.’He sighed. ‘Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate.. headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered, was not all that interested. I wandered around my early twenties, paying rent and reading classifieds and wondering why the lights were not turning green for me.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax.. you cannot support yourself standing.. you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive.. your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk.. like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
..And because he was still able to move his hands – Morrie always spoke with both hands waving – he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
We all have same beginning (BIRTH), and we will have same ending (DEATH). So how different can we be?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?”-Morrie
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I’m so angry and bitter. But it doesn’t last too long. Then I get up and say, ‘I want to live..’ ‘So far, I’ve been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don’t know. But I’m betting on myself I will.’ Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The eighties happened. The nineties happened. Death and sickness and getting fat and going bald happened. I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that’s what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that’s all.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Love wins, love always wins.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Morrie was in a wheelchair full-time now, getting used to helpers lifting him like a heavy sack from the chair to the bed and the bed to the chair.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
if you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you have different set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.Your values must be alike. And the biggest of those values… the belief in the importance of your marriage.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It’s knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish.”It’s only fair, ” he says.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is”.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Now that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, it’s hands are clenched, right? Like this?”He made a fist.”Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say ‘The whole world is mine.'”But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”What lesson? I asked.He stretched open his empty fingers.”We can take nothing with us.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris’s high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go – motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet – was not a good life at all. What happened to me?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?.. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’I decided I’m going to live—or at least try to live—the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I’d simply been on a long vacation. ..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Why are we embarassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Be compassionate … and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Without love we all like birds with broken wings.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The little things, I can obey. The big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society—determine those for you.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a ‘living funeral’. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem: ‘My dear and loving cousin.. Your ageless heart as you , love through time, layer on layer, tender sequoia..’ .. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
If you accept that you can die at any time – then you might not be as ambitious as you are
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything because we’re frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here…Death ends life, not a relationship.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The things you spend so much time on–all this work you do–might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
when he smiles it’s as if you’d just told him the first joke on earth.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it– and have it repeated to us– over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning . Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
.. when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’ I decided I’m going to live – or at least try to live – the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Life is a series of pulls back and forth… A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match…Which side win? Love wins. Love always wins
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things” -he sighed- “these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do? Morrie Schwartz
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Had it not been for “Nightline, ” Morrie would have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have. I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my life. I was busy.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Morrie, ” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet, ” Morrie whispered.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”And facing death changes that?”Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
After all these months, lying there, unable to move a leg or a foot – how could he find perfection in such an average day?Then I realized that was the whole point.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I’d simply been on a long vacation. ..What happened to me? I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too–even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I earned a mater’s degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems – the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
For all that was happening to him, his voice was strong and inviting, and his mind was vibrating with a million thoughts. He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless’.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me. Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Nurses came to his house to work with Morrie’s withering legs.. bending them back and forth as if pumping water from a well.. He met with meditation teachers, and closed his eyes and narrowed his thoughts until his world shrunk down to a single breath, in and out, in and out.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
If you hold back on the emotions–if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them–you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie’s time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
But it’s hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims… and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don’t know any of these people. But–how can I put this?–I’m almost… drawn to them.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But, … there is no such thing as “too late” in life.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on–in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now, ’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?’.. .. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. ‘Well, Mitch it is then, ‘ Morrie says, as if closing a deal. ‘And, Mitch?’ Yes? ‘I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Ted, ” he said, “when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?” I decided I’m going to live-or at least try to live-the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch. ” He finally whispered, “We also need to forgive ourselves.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too—even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Here’s the thing, ” he said. “People see me as a bridge. I’m not as alive as I used to be, but I’m not yet dead. I’m sort of…in-between
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
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