Keep your heart open for as long as you can, as wide as you can, for others and especially for yourself.
Interpretation
Maintaining an open heart fosters connection with others and self-acceptance.
This quote emphasizes the importance of openness in emotional and relational experiences. By encouraging individuals to keep their hearts open, Morrie Schwartz highlights the ability to connect deeply with others and cultivate self-love, serving as a reminder that vulnerability is a strength that leads to richer, more meaningful interactions in life.
In practice
In a speech about emotional intelligence, the quote can remind the audience of the value of openness.
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.
I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.
A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap
In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
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