Excerpt: Morrie Schwartz was dying—and yet had so much left to give. Read our favorite Morrie quotes from Tuesdays With Morrie—the timeless classic.
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 178)
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 174)
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 174)
“‘That’s what we’re all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing.’ Which is? ‘Make peace with living.’“
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 173)
“The problem, Mitch, is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. But, believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning—birth—and we all have the same end—death. So how different can we be? Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 157)
“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.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 156)
“There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: 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 don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 136)
“Part of the problem, Mitch, is that everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 136)
“Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 128)
“If you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 127)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)