Mitch Albom Quotes

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.

So, have we solved the secret of happiness?"I believe so," he saidAre you going to tell me?"Yes.Ready?"Ready."Be satisfied."That's it?"Be greatful."That's it?"For what you have.For the love you receive.And for what God has given you."That's it?He looked me in the eye.Then he sighed deeply."That's it.

In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did?

What is it?”“A prayer.”“For a child?”She nodded.“For me?”Another nod.“On a tree?”“Trees spend all day looking up at God.

Belief, hard work, love–you have those things, you can do anything.

..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.

What is false about hope?

He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart.

Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.

Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.

I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.

Things change when you're not in danger anymore.

I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

Why did you measure the days and nights? To know. Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.

But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

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.

It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.

But it's hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer 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.

He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems - the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”And facing death changes that?"Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.

Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.

She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.

There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and say, 'I want to live..' 'So far, I've been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don't know. But I'm betting on myself I will.' Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced.

Much of what we called "depression" was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for.

I think people believe what they want to believe.

you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it

And is often the case with faith, I thought I was being asked a favor, when in fact I was being given one".

Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet,” Morrie whispered.

...But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.

But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.

I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn't always pretty.

There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?

Doubt is how you find God

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.

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 win? Love wins. Love always wins

A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me. Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.

Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.

when he smiles it's as if you'd just told him the first joke on earth.

You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.

Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?'.. .. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. 'Well, Mitch it is then,' Morrie says, as if closing a deal. 'And, Mitch?' Yes? 'I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.

You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.

Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it’s hard to slow yourself down.

We are, as we die, who we most were in life...

Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward.

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.

A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.

The eighties happened. The nineties happened. Death and sickness and getting fat and going bald happened. I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.

That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays

You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.

You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship

I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.

I don't know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.

You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.

Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind. They're here, too.

Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.

Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.

Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.