“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)
“I know that the sky knows everything, and that its laws are constant. I know that it sees everything, it gets into everything, and it is present in everything. The heavens can get into the depths of all human hearts in the same way that the daylight can lighten a dark room. We should try to reflect this heavenly light.”
Chinese Wisdom, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 128)
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 118)
“By throwing yourself into 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.'”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 104)
“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. Take any emotion—love for a women, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on 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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 104)
“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. 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.'”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 91)
“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 82)
“Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do thing differently. To know you’re going to die, and to 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, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 81)
“In school, you are graded on every test—even if it’s your weakest subject. In life, you can choose the tests you take—even if they always play to your strengths. Maintain a baseline so your weak areas don’t hold you back, but design your life so you are graded on your strengths.”
James Clear, Blog
“It’s what everyone worries about isn’t it? What if today were my last day on earth? …The 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—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?”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 64)
“It’s horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing. But it’s also wonderful because of all the time I get to say good-bye. Not everyone is so lucky.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 57)
“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life. On the people who are coming to see me. On the stories I’m going to hear. On you—if it’s Tuesday. Because we’re Tuesday people.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 57)
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.'”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 52)
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 50)
“It is a mistake to think that there are times when you can safely address a person without love. You can work with objects without love—cutting wood, baking bricks, making iron—but you cannot work with people without love. In the same way as you cannot work with bees without being cautious, you cannot work with people without being mindful of their humanity. It is the quality of people as it is of bees: if you are not very cautious with them, then you harm both yourself and them. It cannot be otherwise, because mutual love is the major law of our existence.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 124)
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 43)