Morrie Schwartz Quotes
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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
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Everything that gets born dies.
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We put our values in the wrong things. And it leads to very disillusioned lives.
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What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats.
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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.
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What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?
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One hundred and ten years from now no one who is here now will be alive.
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Are you trying to be as human as you can be?
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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.
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The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
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These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. There were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is no 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.
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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.
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Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did we would do things differently. Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, "Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?
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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.
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Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.
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In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive. And at the end of life, we need others to survive. But here's the secret, in between, we need others as well.
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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.
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Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?
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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.
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You don't understand. You're not a wave. You're part of the ocean.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you learn to die, you learn to live.
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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.
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After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left.
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Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer more 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.
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Be compassionate, and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much a better place.
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Although you may be old or sick, it's not too late to take stock and ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be.
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If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away.
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