Mitch Albom Quotes

“Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.”

“Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.”

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”

“Love is the only rational act.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“Accept who you are and revel in that.”

“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. 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.”

“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.”

“These people were 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 can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.”

“You see, 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.”

“The truth is . . . once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

“Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, ‘All right, it’s just fear. I don’t have to let it control me.‘”

“Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.”

“By throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.”

“Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.”

“I told Morrie I was already feeing over the hill, much as I tried desperately to stay on top of it. . . . I had gone from being proud to say my age—because of all I had done so young—to not bringing it up, for fear I was getting too close to forty and, therefore, professional oblivion.”

“If you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back.”

“We are so afraid of the sight of death . . . As soon as someone dies in a hospital, they pull the sheets up over their head, and they wheel the body to some chute and push it down. . . . It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.”

“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.”

“Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’”

“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.”

“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 that all? Is that all I want? Is something missing?”

“Part of the problem . . . is that everyone is in such a hurry. . . . 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 these things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

“In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.”

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”

“No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well.”

“Life has to end. Love doesn’t.”

“Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

“You have peace when you make it with yourself.”

“It’s fixed.”

“Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on Earth is only the beginning.”

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

“People say they ‘find’ love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love.”

“For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.”

“Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them. But you are angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost . . . You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life.”

“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“The human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

“Everyone has an idea of heaven, as do most religions, and they should all be respected. The version represented here is only a guess, a wish, in some ways, that my uncle and others like him - people who felt unimportant here on Earth- realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved.”

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

“Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.”

“Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.”

“People think of Heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.”

“Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.”

“Every life has one true love snapshot.”

“This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.”

“There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”

“Kids chase the love that eludes them.”

“A child embarrassed by his mother - is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.”

“What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child.”

“And I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.”

“When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”

“I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make - but it carries a certain taste of memory.”

“One day can bend your life...”

“She had a bottomless well of love for me. Her only flaw was that she didn’t make me work for it.”

“There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice.”

“You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.”

“One day spent with someone you love can change everything.”

“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.”

“I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.”

“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”

“Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”

“When you’re rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.”

“It’s such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.”

“Secrets tear you apart.”

“The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.”

“You need to keep people close, you need to give them access to your heart.”