Book detail: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This memoir explores the deepening bond between Morrie Schwartz, a beloved college professor, and Mitch Albom, his former student, as they meet weekly to discuss life, love, and mortality. The story delves into the wisdom and insights Morrie imparts, offering a moving reflection on the human experience and the importance of living fully.
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“It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered. We also need to forgive ourselves.”
Ourselves?
“Yes. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Mitch," he said, "the culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up in 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?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.
That is what they believe.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. 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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”
“You bet,” Morrie whispered.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
His voice dropped to a whisper. "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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“It's natural to die," he said again. "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."
He smiled at the plant.
"We're not. Everything that gets born, dies.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“.. when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?' I decided I'm going to live - or at least try to live - the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look - until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“What a waste.. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and say, 'I want to live..'
'So far, I've been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don't know. But I'm betting on myself I will.'
Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I'm on the last great journey here--and people want me to tell them what to pack.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“[...] 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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I watched him now, his hands working gingerly, as if he were learning to use them for the first time. He could not press down hard with a knife. His fingers shook. Each bite was a struggle; he chewed the food finely before swallowing.. The skin from his wrist to his knuckles was dotted with age spots, and it was loose, like skin hanging from a chicken soup bone.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?'..
.. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me.
'Well, Mitch it is then,' Morrie says, as if closing a deal.
'And, Mitch?'
Yes?
'I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“You closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too-even when you're in the dark. Even when you're falling.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Morrie had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig's disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system.
There was no known cure.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?"
-Morrie”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The things you spend so much time on--all this work you do--might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here...Death ends life, not a relationship.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Death ends a life, but not a relationship.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “But there’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“It’s very simple. 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.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem:
'My dear and loving cousin..
Your ageless heart
as you move through time, layer on layer,
tender sequoia..'
.. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“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. “ Sounds like a wrestling match, I say. “A wrestling match.” He laughs. “Yes, you could describe life that way.” So which side wins, I ask? “Which side wins?” He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth. “Love wins. Love always wins.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Tears are okay”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it.... So we kid ourselves about death.... But there's a better approach. To know you're going to dies, and to be prepared for it at any time....Do what the Buddhists do...ask, Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“A wrestling match.. Yes, you could describe life that way."
So which side wins, I ask?
He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.
"Love wins. Love always wins.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“A veces no eres capaz de creerte lo que ves, tienes que creer lo que sientes. Y si quieres que los demás lleguen a confiar en ti, tu debes sentir que puedes confiar en ellos, aunque estés a oscuras. Aunque estés cayendo"- Morrie Schwartz”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“People have't found meaning in their lives so they're running all the time looking for it.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“It's only horrible if you see it that way," Morrie said. "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."
He smiled. "Not everyone is so lucky.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?..
He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.
No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“I wrote articles about rich athletes who, for the most part, could not care less about people like me.
.. My days were full, yet I remained, much of the time, unsatisfied.
What happened to me?”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“But I can sit here with my dwindling days and look at what I think is important in life.
I have both the time - and the reason - to do that.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Holding him like that moved me in a way I cannot describe, except to say I felt the seeds of death inside his shrivelling frame, and as I laid him in his chair, adjusting his head on the pillows, I had the coldest realisation that our time was running out.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops -Henry Adams”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn't always pretty.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson