- “Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy.”
- “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.
- So which side wins, I ask? “Which side wins?” He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth. “Love wins. Love always wins.”
- They didn’t know O. J. Simpson. They didn’t know anyone involved in the case. Yet they gave up days and weeks of their lives, addicted to someone else’s drama.
- “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.”
- The way you 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 you purpose and meaning.
- “if you really want it, then you’ll make your dream happen.”
- 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.”
- “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
- 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.”
- What a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them.
- If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”
- 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.’
- Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help.
- Tell yourself, ‘That’s envy, I’m going to separate from it now.’ And walk away.”
- Aging is not just decay. 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.”
- 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. You can’t wait until sixty-five.
- If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.
- It is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.
- You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
- giving to other people is what makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad, it’s as close to healthy as I ever feel.
- 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.
- “I believe in being fully present,” Morrie said. “That means you should be with the person you’re with."
- “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.”
- Many visitors in the last few months of Morrie’s life were drawn not because of the attention they wanted to pay to him but because of the attention he paid to them.
- What we take, we must replenish. “It’s only fair,” he says.
- Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
- “In this culture, it’s so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.
- “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.
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“People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s what our culture does. 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.”
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Building own subculture does not mean you disregard every rule of your community. 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.
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“Every society has its own problems,” Morrie said, lifting his eyebrows, the closest he could come to a shrug. “The way to do it, I think, isn’t to run away. You have to work at creating your own culture.
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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.
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Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl. I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.
- It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch, he finally whispered. We also need to forgive ourselves.
- 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.
- There is no such thing as “too late” in life. He was changing until the day he said good-bye.
- Taking just makes me feel like I’m dying. Giving makes me feel like I’m living.