Morrie Schwartz 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”