"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."
"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."
"Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another."
"So we don’t 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?"
"Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again, “but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently."
"Most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do."
"You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently."
"The things you spend so much time on—all this work you do—might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things."
"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.’"
"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."
"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."
"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.’"
"Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well."
"It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twentytwo, 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 a better life because of it."
Quotes of wisdom by Mitch Albom
Tuesdays
with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
