So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that many individuals lead unfulfilling lives by pursuing superficial goals rather than meaningful ones.
Morrie Schwartz reflects on the nature of life and fulfillment, suggesting that many people go through their daily routines without truly understanding the significance of their actions. This 'half-asleep' existence arises from an obsession with pursuits that lack depth and purpose, leading them away from what is genuinely important in life, ultimately resulting in a sense of emptiness.
In practice
During a motivational speech about finding true purpose in life.
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.
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
Americanism is not a matter of skin or color.
Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers. Yet their passion for this land stemmed from the Book of Books ... [The Bible is] the single most important book in my life.
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.