“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)
“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, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 42)
“The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: in the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 142)
“He had refused fancy clothes or makeup for this interview. His philosophy was that death should not be embarrassing; he was not about to powder its nose.”
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 21)
“He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless.'”
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 12)
“Mankind has never achieved greatness but through suffering.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 122)
“Ignorance in itself is neither shameful nor harmful. Nobody can know everything. But pretending that you know what you actually do not know is both shameful and harmful.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 121)
“Many good opportunities are ruined for the dream of slightly better ones. Would you have a more successful career if you had taken that other job or moved cities? Possibly. But your actual career will definitely suffer if you don’t commit to doing it to the best of your ability. Would you be 10% happier in a different relationship? Maybe. Maybe not. But you’ll definitely be unhappy in the one you have if you spend all day thinking about what else is out there. The surefire way to end up worse off is to agonize over unchosen options and fail to make the most of the one you selected. Every minute spent yearning for your unlived lives is a moment you can’t invest in the one you actually have. Choices matter, but so does your level of commitment.”
James Clear, Blog