Great Throughts Treasury

"So heavenly father, what’s my reward? Reward? What reward? That’s what you were supposed to do."

"The only whole heart is a broken heart."

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

"The only difference between martial and marital is where you put the `i’."

"The genius of life is its variety. If you played one note and kept playing it all of the time, you’d go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that make the music."

"What do people most fear about death? Being forgotten."

"The secret of happiness… be satisfied… be grateful. For what you have. For the love you receive. And for what God has given you."

"Love is how you stay alive, even after you're gone ... Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"You can’t touch everything and be connected to nothing."

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

"When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times."

"No life is a waste... The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone."

"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."

"Accept who you are; and revel in it."

"Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back."

"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

"The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

"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."

"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."

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

"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 begin."

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

"There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

"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."

"You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself."

"Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face."

"Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

"Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."

"Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent."

"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."

"Love wins, love always wins."

"There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice."

"One day can bend your life."

"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."

"We've got a sort 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."

"Don't let go too soon, but don't hold on too long."

"Going back to something is harder than you think."

"Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

"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."

"You have to work at creating your own culture."

"People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does."

"Love lost is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end. Love doesn’t."

"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 harms we do, we do to ourselves."

"I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never realized I was doing it,"

"Love each other or die."

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

"Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left? He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying."

"Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? ... He could be research. A human textbook. 'Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me"