Explore Quotes by Morrie Schwartz

Although you may be old or sick, it's not too late to take stock and ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be.

We put our values in the wrong things. And it leads to very disillusioned lives.

What's wrong with being number two?

Dying is only one thing to be sad over... Living unhappily is something else.

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.

Everything that gets born dies.

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. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.

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.

Build a little community of those you love and who love you

There is no experience like having children...If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.

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.

Be compassionate, and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much a better place.

Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer more 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 don't know any of these people. But - how can I put this? I'm almost......drawn to them.

These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. There 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. Money is no substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.

Keep your heart open for as long as you can, as wide as you can, for others and especially for yourself.

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

We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country…. 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 nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.

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. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.

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 part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.

For me, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them.