Tuesdays with Morrie Quotes With Page Numbers
“Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do. Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 18
“Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 35
“Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 35
“Life is a series of pulls back and forth… A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match…Which side wins? Love wins. Love always wins”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 40
“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. “A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle. “ Sounds like a wrestling match, I say. “A wrestling match.” He laughs. “Yes, you could describe life that way.” So which side wins, I ask? “Which side wins?” He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth. “Love wins. Love always wins.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 40
“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do somehing else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 40
“Love wins, love always wins.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 40
“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. 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.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 43
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levin said it right. He said, “Love is the only rational act.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 52
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 52
“ I seemed to slip into a time warp when I visited Morrie, and I liked myself better when I was there.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 55
“I give myself a good cry if I need it, but then I concentrate on all good things still in my life.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 57
“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that’s all.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 57
“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 57
“You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. 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.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 61
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,’ he said again, ‘but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 81
“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 82
“Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 83
“This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It’s knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 92
“Without love, we are birds with broken wings.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 92
“Don’t cling to things because everything is impermanent.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 103
“Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent… But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you.
On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it…You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief… But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. “All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 103
“Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. 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. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. 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’.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Pages 103, 104
“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. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 104
“The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads -none of us ever got enough of that. We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of – unconditional love, unconditional attention. Most of us didn’t get enough.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 116
“Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 118
“As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you’d always be 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 the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 118
“Accept who you are; and revel in it.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 120
“The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 120, 121
“We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country, Morrie sighed. 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 of this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’
You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They 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 not a 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.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Pages 124, 125
“There’s a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need…you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 126
“There’s a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need,” Morrie said. “You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don’t need the latest sports car, you don’t need the biggest house. The truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?… Offering others what you have to give…I don’t mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It’s not so hard.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 126
“Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 127
“If you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down on you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Pages 127, 128
“Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad…”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 128
“there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 149
“People are only mean when they are threatened.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 154
“The little things, I can obey. The big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society—determine those for you.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 155
“The problem, Mitch, is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning – birth – and we all have the same end – death. So how different can we be?
Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Pages 156, 157
“We all have the same beginning – birth – and we all have the same end – death. So how different can we be?”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 157
“Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 162
“Be compassionate,” Morrie whispered. And take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.”
He took a breath, then added his mantra: “Love each other or die.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 163
“There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things” -he sighed- “these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie Schwartz, Page 164
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 164
“We need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 166
“It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 166
“All I was afraid of is saying good-bye.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 168
“It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 172
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 174
“There is no such thing as ‘too late’ in life.”
~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, Page 190
Tuesdays with Morrie follows the relationship between Mitch and his former college professor, Morrie Schwartz, as Morrie struggles with ALS.
Throughout their visits, Mitch discovers that life is about more than just material possessions and status—it’s about making connections and living purposefully.
Morrie’s wise words and life lessons throughout their meetings teach Mitch valuable lessons about death, love, family, relationships, and more.
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