“You know what really gives you satisfaction? Offering others what you have to give. I don’t mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It’s not so hard.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 126)
“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. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 125)
“Work is necessary. If you want a good disposition of your spirit, work until you become tired. But not too much. Not until you become exhausted. A good spiritual disposition can be destroyed by excessive work as well as by idleness.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 131)
“We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. 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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 124)
“Try to understand and remember that a person always tries to do what is best for himself. And if he is right when he does the best thing for himself, it is good; but if he is mistaken, it is bad, because suffering will follow after such mistakes. If you remember this, then you will never be upset by anybody, you will never reproach anybody, and you will never be an enemy to anybody.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 130)
“If there is animosity between two people, both are to blame. Any number you multiply by zero, however big, will equal zero. If there is animosity, then, it is the animosity of two people toward each other, and it exists in both of them.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 130)
“Mitch, it is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy-eight. 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, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 120)
“Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 118)
“If aging were so valuable, why do people always say, ‘Oh, if I were young again.’ You never hear people say, ‘I wish I were sixty-five.’ [Morrie] smiled. ‘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, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 118)
“Timidity is dangerous. Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 147)