
Tuesdays With Morrie Quotes | My Favourite Mitch Albom Book
My favorite quotes from Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom.
The Classroom
âDying, 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.â Why?
âWell, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. Weâre teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesnât work, donât buy it. Create your own. Most people canât do it. Theyâre more unhappy than meâeven in my current condition.
âLife 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 shouldnât. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. âA tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
âSo many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when theyâre busy doing things they think are important. This is because theyâre chasing the wrong things. 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.â
The First Tuesday We Talk About the World
âBut itâs hard to explain, Mitch. Now that Iâm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer 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 donât know any of these people. Butâhow can I put this?âIâm almost ⌠drawn to them.â
âThe most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.ââLet it come in. We think we donât deserve love, we think if we let it in weâll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, âLove is the only rational act.ââ
The Second Tuesday We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself
âI give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.âMitch, I donât allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each morning, a few tears, and thatâs all.â
” 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, tooâeven when youâre in the dark. Even when youâre falling.â
The Third Tuesday We Talk About Regrets
âthe culture doesnât encourage you to think about such things until youâre about to die. Weâre so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaksâweâre involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we donât 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?â
The Fourth Tuesday We Talk About Death
How can you ever be prepared to die? âDo what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, âIs today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?ââ
âOnce you learn how to die, you learn how to live.â
âWell, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any timethen you might not be as ambitious as you are.”âThe things you spend so much time onâall this work you doâmight not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.â
âeven I donât know what âspiritual developmentâ really means. But I do know weâre deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they donât satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.â
The Fifth Tuesday We Talk About Family
âLove each other or perish.ââItâs good, no? And itâs so true. Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
âThis is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know thereâs someone who is watching out for them. Itâs what I missed so much when my mother diedâwhat I call your âspiritual securityââknowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.â
âThere is no experience like having children.â Thatâs all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. 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.â
The Sixth Tuesday We Talk About Emotions
âYou know what the Buddhists say? Donât cling to things, because everything is impermanent.â
âTake any emotionâlove for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what Iâm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotionsâif you donât allow yourself to go all the way through themâyou can never get to being detached, youâre too busy being afraid. Youâre afraid of the pain, youâre afraid of the grief. Youâre afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
âBut by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, âAll right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.ââ
The Seventh Tuesday We Talk About the Fear o f Aging
âItâs very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, youâd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. Itâs growth. Itâs more than the negative that youâre going to die, itâs also the positive that you understand youâre going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.â
“Because if youâve found meaning in your life, you donât want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You canât wait until sixty-five. âListen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If youâre always battling against getting older, youâre always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.”
The Eighth Tuesday We Talk About Money
âWeâve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country,â âDo you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And thatâs 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 itâand have it repeated to usâover and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on whatâs really important anymore.
âYou know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You canât substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. âMoney is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as Iâm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling youâre looking for, no matter how much of them you have.â
âThereâs a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need,â
âI donât mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. Itâs notthere every day. If youâre a young man or young woman and you have a skill, you are asked to come and teach it. Say you know computers. You come there and teach them computers. You are very welcome there. And they are very grateful. This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have. âThere are plenty of places to do this. You donât need to have a big talent. There are lonely people in hospitals and shelters who only want some companionship. You play cards with a lonely older man and you find new respect for yourself, because you are needed. âRemember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
âMitch, if youâre trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if youâre 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.â
âDo the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you wonât be dissatisfied, you wonât be envious, you wonât be longing for somebody elseâs things. On the contrary, youâll be overwhelmed with what comes back.â
The Ninth Tuesday We Talk About How Love Goes On
âPart of the problem, Mitch, is that everyone is in such a hurry,ââPeople havenât found meaning in their lives, so theyâre 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.â
The Tenth Tuesday We Talk About Marriage
âWell, I feel sorry for your generation,ââIn this culture, itâs so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that. But the poor kids today, either theyâre too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced. They donât know what they want in a partner. They donât know who they are themselvesâso how can they know who theyâre marrying?â
âItâs sad, because a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when youâre in a time like I am, when youâre not doing so well. Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when youâre coughing and canât sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.â
âthere are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you donât respect the other person, youâre gonna have a lot of trouble. If you donât know how to compromise, youâre gonna have a lot of trouble. If you canât talk openly about what goes on between you, youâre gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you donât have a common set of values in life, youâre gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
The Eleventh Tuesday We Talk About Our Culture
âHereâs what I mean by building your own little subculture,ââI donât mean you disregard every rule of your community. I donât go around naked, for example. I donât run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big thingsâhow we think, what we valueâthose you must choose yourself. You canât let anyoneâor any society determine those for you.
âEvery society has its own problems,ââThe way to do it, I think, isnât to run away. You have to work at creating your own culture.âLook, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We donât see what we could be. We should be looking at our po-tential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if youâre surrounded by people who say âI want mine now,â you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.â
âThe problem, Mitch, is that we donât believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. âBut believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginningâbirthâand we all have the same endâdeath. So how different can we be? âInvest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.â
âIn 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?ââBut hereâs the secret: in between, we need others as well.â
The Twelfth Tuesday We Talk About Forgiveness
âItâs not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,â he finally whispered. We also need to forgive ourselves.âFor all the things we didnât do. All the things we should have done. You canât get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. That doesnât help you when you get to where I am.
âI always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.ââForgive yourself. Forgive others. Donât wait, Mitch. Not everyone gets the time Iâm getting. Not everyone is as lucky.â
The Thirteenth Tuesday We Talk About the Perfect Day
âAs 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 onâin the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.â
âDeath ends a life, not a relationship.â
I’ve read this book over and over again.
Below the the link to see the movie
