Morrie Schwartz. Quotes & Sayings

We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. — Morrie Schwartz.

What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats. — Morrie Schwartz.

How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day. — Morrie Schwartz.

What is it about silence that makes people uneasy? — Morrie Schwartz.

Life is like a wrestling match- we struggle to fight but we never know that the only side that wins is the one with great love in it. — Morrie Schwartz.

We have a sense that we should be like the mythical cowboy ... able to take on and conquer anything and live in the world without the need for other people. — Morrie Schwartz.

It's not to late to ... ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be. — Morrie Schwartz.

It's natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human we're something above nature. — Morrie Schwartz.

One hundred and ten years from now no one who is here now will be alive. — Morrie Schwartz.

Now is the time to work on becoming the kind of person you would like to be. — Morrie Schwartz.

Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another — Morrie Schwartz.

It's not too late to develop new friendships or reconnect with people. — Morrie Schwartz.

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.

Everything that gets born dies. — Morrie Schwartz.

When you learn to die, you learn to live. — Morrie Schwartz.

I believe that even though each person has an individual and unique self, the self means nothing outside the context of community or meaningful contact with other people. — Morrie Schwartz.

Build a little community of those you love and who love you — Morrie Schwartz.

After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left. — Morrie Schwartz.

Grieve and mourn for yourself not once or twice, but again and again. — Morrie Schwartz.

So many peoplpe 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 to 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 your purpose and meaning — Morrie Schwartz.

I'd always been interested in psychology. — Morrie Schwartz.

This is how you start to get respect: by offering something that you have. — Morrie Schwartz.

The tension of opposites:
Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.
A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle. — Morrie Schwartz.

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.

If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. — Morrie Schwartz.

As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be 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 the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it. — Morrie Schwartz.

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.

For me, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them ... — Morrie Schwartz.

I believe in being fully present. That means you should be with the person you're with. — Morrie Schwartz.

People are only mean when they're threatened ... and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does. 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.

Dying is only one thing to be sad over ... Living unhappily is something else. — Morrie Schwartz.

Accept yourself, your physical condition and your fate as they are at the present moment. — Morrie Schwartz.

Acceptance is not a talent you either have or don't have. It's a learned response. My meditation teacher made a great point about the difference between a reaction and a response: You may not have control over your initial reaction to something, but you can decide what your response will be. You don't have to be at the mercy of your emotions, and acceptance can be your first step toward empowerment ... For me, acceptance has been the cornerstone to my having an emotionally healthy response to my illness. — Morrie Schwartz.

The best way to deal with that is to live in a fully conscious, compassionate, loving way. Don't wait until you're on your deathbed to recognize that this is the only way to live. — Morrie Schwartz.

Do the kind 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 overhelmed with what comes back — Morrie Schwartz.

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. — Morrie Schwartz.

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. 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.

Keep your heart open for as long as you can, as wide as you can, for others and especially for yourself. — Morrie Schwartz.

All this emphasis on youth - I don't buy it. Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves ... and in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live everyday when you don't know what's going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy - and you believe them! It's such nonsense. — Morrie Schwartz.

Learn how to live and you'll know how to die; learn how to die, and you'll know how to live. — Morrie Schwartz.

Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.
— Morrie Schwartz.

We put our values in the wrong things. And it leads to very disillusioned lives. — Morrie Schwartz.

Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long. — Morrie Schwartz.

The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical 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.

What's wrong with being number two? — Morrie Schwartz.

If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away. — Morrie Schwartz.

Once you learn how to diw, you learn how to live — Morrie Schwartz.

All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well. — Morrie Schwartz.

When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions. — Morrie Schwartz.

Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air-until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. "My God, this is terrible," the wave says. "Look what's going to happen to me!"
Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, "Why do you look so sad?"
The first wave says, "You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?"
The second wave says, "No, you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean. — Morrie Schwartz.

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.

The little things, I can obey. But 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.

My contention is that as long as you have other faculties-the emotional, psychological, intuitive faculties-you haven't lost yourself or even diminished yourself. Don't be ashamed when you're physically limited or dysfunctional; don't think that you're any less because of your condition. In fact, I feel I am even more myself than I was before I got this illness because I have been able to transcend many of the psychological and emotional limitations I had before I developed ALS. — Morrie Schwartz.