Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it… Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on…
Catalog
Morrie Schwartz
Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz (December 20, 1916 – November 4, 1995) was a sociology professor at Brandeis University and an author. He was the subject of the best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie, which was written by Mitch Albom, a sportswriter who was a former student of his, and published in 1997. The book was followed by a film version based on the book that was made for television. 2Family Morrie's father, Charlie Schwartz, was a Russian immigrant who left Russia to escape the Russian Army. But later in Morrie's life Charlie suffered from a heart attack after running from two muggers. His mother died when he was only 8 years old. After his wife died, Charlie Schwartz remarried a Romanian woman named Eva who became Morrie's stepmother. Morrie had a younger brother David who developed polio at a young age. Morrie's whole family was Jewish. But later in his life Morrie stopped believing in this fait
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. I see it for what it is.
Will I be able to continue? I don’t know. But I’m betting on myself that I WILL.
The biggest defect we human beings have is our 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…
Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Ask for forgiveness from others. Forgiveness can soften the heart, drain the bitterness, and dissolve your guilt.
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
If you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?
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 apart of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature… We’re not.
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.
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…
Society teaches us to be number one, but who ever said there was something wrong with being number two?
You don't understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.
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.…
Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
It’s okay to cry.
Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.
As you grow old, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. 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…
Don't stay preoccupied with your body or your illness. Recognize that your body is not your total self, only part of it.
Accept yourself your physical condition and your fate as they are at the present moment.