2. “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” – Morrie Schwartz
3. “Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.” – Morrie Schwartz
4. “You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.” – Morrie Schwartz
5. “Love each other or perish.” – Morrie Schwartz
6. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
7. “The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” – Morrie Schwartz
8. “Accept who you are; and revel in it.” – Morrie Schwartz
9. “Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hold on too long.” – Morrie Schwartz
10. “You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.” – Morrie Schwartz
11. “There is no such thing as ‘too late’ in life.” – Mitch Albom
12. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
13. “Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.” – Morrie Schwartz
14. “Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.” – Morrie Schwartz
15. “As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at 22, you’d always be 22. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s the positive that you understand you’re going to die and that you live a better life because of it.” – Morrie Schwartz
16. “Be compassionate, and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.” – Morrie Schwartz
17. “Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.” – Morrie Schwartz
18. “The truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. Do you know what really gives you satisfaction? Offering others what you have to give.” – Morrie Schwartz
19. “Okay. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away.” – Morrie Schwartz
20. “Life is a series of pulls back and forth.” – Morrie Schwartz
21. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
22. “There’s a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need.” – Morrie Schwartz
23. “The slightest human contact was immediate joy.” – Mitch Albom
24. “Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?” – Morrie Schwartz
25. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
26. “If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.” – Morrie Schwartz
27. “He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless.’” – Mitch Albom
28. “The universe is too grand and harmonious to believe it’s all an accident.” – Morrie Schwartz
29. “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” – Morrie Schwartz
30. “Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.” – Morrie Schwartz
31. “You need someone to probe you in that direction. It won’t just happen automatically.” – Morrie Schwartz
32. “You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.” – Morrie Schwartz
33. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
34. “Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.” – Morrie Schwartz
35. “Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.” – Mitch Albom
36. “We all have the same beginning, and we will have the same ending. So how different can we be?” – Morrie Schwartz
37. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
38. “You’re not a wave, you are part of the ocean.” – Morrie Schwartz
39. “All the memories are still there. You live on—in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured.” – Morrie Schwartz
40. “This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.” – Morrie Schwartz
41. “You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.” – Morrie Schwartz
42. “If you really want it, then you’ll make your dream happen.” – Morrie Schwartz
Tuesdays with Morrie Quotes on Family
43. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
44. “There is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family.” – Morrie Schwartz
45. “He doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.” – Charlotte Schwartz
46. “Knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.” – Morrie Schwartz
47. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
48. “Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a small community of those you love and who love you.” – Morrie Schwartz
49. “If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.” – Morrie Schwartz
50. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
51. “We will hold hands. And there’ll be a lot of love passing between us. Ted, we’ve had 35 years of friendship. You don’t need speech or hearing to feel that.” – Morrie Schwartz
52. “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” – Morrie Schwartz
53. “We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. Love is the only rational act.” – Morrie Schwartz
54. “As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away.” – Morrie Schwartz
55. “Love wins. Love always wins.” – Morrie Schwartz
56. “In all the years I have listened to my wife sing, I never heard her the way he did at that moment.” – Mitch Albom
57. “Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.” – Morrie Schwartz
58. “Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.” – Morrie Schwartz
59. “Without love, we are birds with broken wings.” – Morrie Schwartz
60. “Have you found someone to share your heart with?” – Morrie Schwartz
61. “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
62. “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 a 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.” – Morrie Schwartz
63. “Every society has its own problem—you have to work at creating a new culture.” – Morrie Schwartz
64. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
65. “Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?” – Morrie Schwartz
66. “Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it.” – Morrie Schwartz
67. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
68. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
69. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
70. “The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent. The world I discovered was not all that interested.” – Mitch Albom
71. “Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.” – Morrie Schwartz
72. “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights.” – Morrie Schwartz
73. “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 researched. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.” – Mitch Albom
74. “Are you giving to your community? Are you at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?” – Morrie Schwartz
75. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
76. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
77. “Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. 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.’” – Mitch Albom
78. “You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.” – Morrie Schwartz
79. “Sometimes when you’re losing someone, you hang on to whatever tradition you can.” – Mitch Albom
80. “I hope you can find the healing power in grieving.” – Morrie Schwartz
81. “Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.” – Mitch Albom
82. “It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.” – Morrie Schwartz
83. “For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.” – Mitch Albom
84. “I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s death-notice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the city morgue.” – Mitch Albom
85. “What if today were my last day on earth?” – Morrie Schwartz
86. “I don’t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what’s happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go.” – Morrie Schwartz
87. “Our culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. 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—were 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?” – Morrie Schwartz
88. “Yes, but there’s a better approach. To know you’re going to die and be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.” – Morrie Schwartz
89. “Tapes, like photographs and videos, are a desperate attempt to steal something from death’s suitcase.” – Mitch Albom
90. “If you accept that you can die at any time—then you might not be as ambitious as you are.” – Morrie Schwartz
91. “Here’s the thing. 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.” – Morrie Schwartz
92. “I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want him to forget me.” – Mitch Albom
93. “I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.” – Mitch Albom
94. “Tell you what. After I’m dead, you talk. And I’ll listen.” – Morrie Schwartz
95. “I know I cannot undo this. None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded.” – Mitch Albom
96. “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.” – Morrie Schwartz
97. “I give myself a good cry if I need it, but then I concentrate on all good things still in my life.” – Morrie Schwartz
98. “Mitch, I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each morning, a few tears, and that’s all.” – Morrie Schwartz
99. “There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?” – Morrie Schwartz
100. “You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.” – Morrie Schwartz
101. “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
102. “I believe he knew that he was in his own bed, that his books and his notes and his small hibiscus plant were nearby. He wanted to go serenely, and that is how he went.” – Mitch Albom
103. “When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad, it’s as close to healthy as I ever feel.” – Morrie Schwartz
104. “Same for loneliness; you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be able to say, ‘All right, that was my moment of loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.’” – Morrie Schwartz
105. “All right, I’ll be your coach. And you can be my player. You can play all the lovely parts of life that I’m too old for now.” – Morrie Schwartz
106. “Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.” – Mitch Albom
107. “I told Morrie I was already feeling over the hill, much as I tried desperately to stay on top of it. I worked out constantly. Watched what I ate. Checked my hairline in the mirror. I had gone from being proud to say my age—because of all I had done so young—to not bringing it up, for fear I was getting too close to forty and, therefore, professional oblivion.” – Mitch Albom
108. “How can I be envious of where you are when I’ve been there myself?” – Morrie Schwartz
109. “We all know how to be a child. It’s inside all of us. For me, it’s just remembering how to enjoy it.” – Morrie Schwartz
110. “What she mostly wanted, he learned, was the same thing many people want—someone to notice she was there.” – Mitch Albom
111. “Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.” – Morrie Schwartz
112. “I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.” – Mitch Albom
113. “I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately.” – Mitch Albom
114. “When you’re in bed, you’re dead.” – Morrie Schwartz
115. “When he smiles it’s as if you’d just told him the first joke on earth.” – Mitch Albom
116. “I have heartburn and diarrhea at the moment. Life’s a bitch. Chat Later?” – Peter Albom
117. “We’re Tuesday people.” – Morrie Schwartz
118. “Tears are okay.” – Morrie Schwartz
119. “Mitch, I embrace aging.” – Morrie Schwartz
120. “We can take nothing with us.” – Morrie Schwartz
121. “I am every age, up to my own.” – Morrie Schwartz
122. “Shouldn’t the world stop.” – Mitch Albom
123. “Don’t they know what has happened to me?” – Mitch Albom
124. “That is what they believe.” – Mitch Albom
125. “We need others as well.” – Morrie Schwartz
126. “I believe in being fully present.” – Morrie Schwartz
127. “The teaching goes on.” – Mitch Albom
128. “What’s wrong with being number two?” – Morrie Schwartz
129. “I worked because I could control it.” – Mitch Albom
