The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.
Interpretation
Family provides a crucial sense of stability and support in life.
Morrie Schwartz emphasizes the idea that in a constantly changing world, the family unit serves as the most reliable and secure foundation for individuals. It highlights the importance of familial bonds and support as essential for navigating life's uncertainties.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of maintaining close bonds, one can use this quote to underline the necessity of family.
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.
The best way to deal with that is to live in a fully conscious, compassionate, loving way. Don't wait until you're on your deathbed to recognize that this is the only way to live.
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.
Do the kind 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 overhelmed with what comes back
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.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
My father wasn't a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher - one of those Victorians, hard as iron - but my dad was tough enough.
If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?
The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
I would look at a dog and when our eyes met, I realized that the dog and all creatures are my family. They're like you and me.
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.
All of us remember the home of our childhood. Interestingly, our thoughts do not dwell on whether the house was large or small, the neighborhood fashionable or downtrodden. Rather, we delight in the experiences we shared as a family. The home is the laboratory of our lives, and what we learn there largely determines what we do when we leave there.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.