Morrie Schwartz famous quotes

Sometimes you cannot believe what you see. You have to believe what you feel.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Believe #Sometimes #Feels

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Love #Life #Nature

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

#Party #Winning #Love Is

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

#Thinking #Littles #Little Things

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

#Motivational #Strong #People

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

#Forgiving #Forgive Yourself #Learn To Forgive

Once you learn how to die you learn how to live
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Love

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

#Memories #Love You #Heart

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

#Love You #Community #Littles

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

#Jobs #Mean #People

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

#Want #Persons

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

#Mean #Feelings #Emotion

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

#Loss #Cherish #Function

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

#Dying

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

#Wise #Tuesdays With Morrie #Love Is

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

#People #New Friendship #Too Late

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

#Grieving #Mourn

Everything that gets born dies.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Born

The truth is, part of me is every age. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Wise #Children #Men

Be compassionate, and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much a better place.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Responsibility #Helping Others #Would Be

What's wrong with being number two?
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Two #Numbers

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.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Running #Helping Others #Night

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.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Inspirational #Giving #People

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

#Believe #Mean #Should

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

#Disillusioned #Values

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

#Heart #Acceptance #Long

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

#Being Happy

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

#Way #Looks #Fence

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

#Psychology #Rats #Scales

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

#Reality #Waiting #Way

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.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Inspirational Life #Life Lesson #Thinking

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

#Psychology

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

#Hurt #Tuesdays With Morrie #Opposites

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

#Tuesdays With Morrie #Tears #Stranger

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

#Country #Thinking #Average

Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time–then you might not be as ambitious as you are.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Bird #Ambitious #Might

You don't understand. You're not a wave. You're part of the ocean.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Ocean #Wave

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

#Want #Found #Live By

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

#Health #Emotional #Thinking

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

#Teacher #Acceptance #Differences

Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Believe

And, in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day 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

#Beautiful #Wise #Sexy

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #Feelings

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

#Years #Alive #Hundred

There is no experience like having children...If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Children #Responsibility #Want

Are you trying to be as human as you can be?
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Trying #Humans

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

#Thinking #Facts #Natural

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

#Caring #Support #And Love

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

#People #Unhappy #Getting Older

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#People #May #Today

If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Culture

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

#Cowboy #People #World

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

#Heart #Kind #Longing

Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are 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.
-- Morrie Schwartz

#Trust #Believe #Fall

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

#People #Silence #Uneasy

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

#Littles #Keep Going