Morrie Schwartz Quotes

Morrie has to make the choice to be positive every single day. It's not easy. He wants to give in and be miserable every morning, but after allowing himself to be sad for a little while, picks himself up again and resolves to be happy.

Morrie says something important here: You can't make decisions for other people. He knows that the important things in life have to be decided on your own, so all that you can do is tell someone your own experience of having made a certain decision.

Being self-aware is key to making choices. Morrie says that he's able to make choices about the way that he's going to feel, and that once he looks honestly at himself and accepts what he's going through, he's able to judge which decision will be the best for him.

Acceptance is an important type of choice. Morrie is describing a moment where he felt that he was actually dying and how he felt unbelievably peaceful when he accepted what was going on. He made the choice to accept rather than to fight, which would have made him anxious and afraid.

Morrie explains his decision to be positive through his suffering. He admits that this wasn't easy and that he found himself at a crossroads where he could have decided one way or the other. He decides that he's going to be happy instead of scared and unhappy.

This is Mitch and Morrie's first friend moment. We see Morrie's super loving nature kind of overwhelming Mitch, which kind of sets up their dynamic in which Morrie showers Mitch with sincere love and affection and Mitch doesn't really know how to respond. He learns over time, though… thanks to Morrie.

Here goes Morrie with the let's-be-friends thing again. During his first class, Morrie asks Mitch what he likes to be called, which is a friendly thing for a professor to do. And Mitch feels like there's some kind of "deal" being closed. Friendship is a deal, a choice.

Morrie is talking about family. Even though he has lots of friends who come to visit him, he's saying that family is a type of friendship that can't be replaced. It's so important for people to have family because they're stuck to you no matter what.

In their talk about forgiveness, Morrie opens up to Mitch and tells him about an old friend whom he turned his back on because of a bad situation between them. He's sad about it now because he never had the chance to make things right, and tells Mitch that forgiveness toward friends is always more important than wanting to be right.

Here Morrie makes a statement that goes way beyond friendship. He's already said that family is the most intense friendship, and here he puts Mitch right there with his family, saying that if he could pick additions to the family he already has, it would be him.

Morrie pummels Mitch with really deep personal questions during their first meeting. These questions outline what Morrie has come to believe truly matters in life—and they're big questions. We doubt that anyone could confidently answer yes to all of them.

According to Morrie, our culture surrounds us with the wrong principles and priorities. The only way to fight this is to create your own set of principles. Basically we have to work against the system to live the right way.

Here Morrie gives us his secret to success, the principle that orders all the others: We have to love. If we love, we're able to put the right priorities on everything else in life, mainly putting others before ourselves. If you learn to be comfortable with sharing your heart and allowing others to share theirs, you just can't go wrong.

Take it from Morrie: Being young is overrated. Youth comes with all kinds of the wrong priorities—beauty, looks, fads—and these things don't make people wise, only foolish and unhappy. It's not impossible, but it's very difficult for young people to have the right priorities. But at the same time, everybody wants to be young.

Morrie admits that his state of happiness is very hard work, and doesn't always pan out. He's affected by fear and depression just like anybody else, and goodness knows that Morrie has more reason to be miserable than many people right now.

Sounds kind of like Mitch when he was young, doesn't it? Life becomes this mad race to accumulate things in the name of piling up happiness. The race gets more and more desperate, though, because people don't get happier and they don't have any time to stop and rethink their priorities.

Morrie draws from Buddhism here, and the idea is to work on perfecting yourself so that when the time comes, we're ready to go. The people we're accountable to are ourselves.

Morrie is admitting that spiritual stuff is a lot to figure out, even in his old age. But he does know that it's something that is the opposite of materialism. There's definitely something else out there that we need, because material things just don't cut it.

Morrie and Mitch are willing to entertain the idea of reincarnation. The idea of being born again as a different creature comes from the Hindu faith. This idea doesn't come up a lot and they aren't even saying that they definitely think it's a true idea, but Morrie is willing to think of it as an option.

Morrie is saying that despite what each of us believes, we should be able to recognize what makes us all the same—faith shouldn't be something that keeps people apart. Clearly, Morrie values this one human family more than particulars about what put us here on earth and where we'll go afterwards.