I had a good chat with a friend last night and we were talking about life and problems. Now, I just want to share to you some of the beautiful lines I came across while reading the Tuesdays with Morrie book. I hope you’ll be moved the way I did back then.

- do i wither up and disappear, or do i make the best of my time left?

- the word “dying” was not synonymous with “useless.”

- 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.

- dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.

- 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.

- a wrestling match. yes, you could describe life that way.

- love wins. love always wins.

- the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. and you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.

- 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 busy 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.

- money is not the most important thing. i need to be fully human.

- if you really want it, then you’ll make your dream happen.

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

- the most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to 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 Levine said it right. He said, Love is the only rational act.

- why are we embarrassed by silence? what comfort do we find in all the noise?

- i give myself a good cry if i need it. but then i concentrate on all the good things still in my life. on the people who are coming to see me.

- how useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.

- not everyone is so lucky.

- you closed your eyes. 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.

- we’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks - we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. so we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all i want? is something missing? you need someone to probe you in that direction. it won’t just happen automatically.

- we all need teachers in our lives.

- we will hold hands and there’ll be a lot of love passing between us. we’ve had thirty five years of friendship. you don’t need speech or hearing to feel that.

- everyone knows they’re going to die but nobody believes it. if we did, we would do things differently.

- to know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. that’s better. that way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.

- is today the day? am i ready? am i doing all i need to do? am i being the person i want to be?

- once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

- most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. we really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.

- truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time - then you might not be as ambitious as you are.

- we are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. the loving relationship we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

- the fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. if you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that  you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. love is supremely important. love each other or perish.

- without love, we are birds with broken wings.

- this is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting other’s know there’s someone who is watching out for them.

- spiritual security — knowing that you family will be there watching out for you. nothing else will give you that. not money. not fame.

- do not stop your lives.

- there is no experience like having children. if  you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

- don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent.

- 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.

- if you hold back 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. 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 you can say, “all right. i have experienced that emotion. i recognized that emotion. now i need to detach from that emotion for a moment.”

- wash yourself with the emotion. it won’t hurt you. it will only help. if you let the fear inside, if pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “all right, it’s just fear. i don’t have to let it control me. i see it for what it is/”

- same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely - but eventually be able to say, “all right that was my moment with loneliness. i’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now i’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and i’m going to experience them as well.”

- when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads - none of us ever get 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.

- all this emphasis on youth - i don’t buy it. listen, i know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great. all these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves…and in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. they have very little understanding about life. who wants to live everyday when you don’t know what’s going on? when people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful or this pair of jeans and  you’ll be sexy - and you believe them! it’s such nonsense.

- as you grow, you learn more. if you stayed at twenty-two, you’d be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. aging is not just decay, you know. it’s growth. it’s more than the negative that you’re going to dies, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you have a better life because of it.

- why do people say, “oh, if i were young again.”… you know what that reflects? unsatisfied lives. unfulfilled lives. lives that haven’t found meaning. because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. you want to go forward. you want to see more, do more. you can’t wait until sixty-five.

- listen. you should know something. all younger people should know something. if you’re always battling against the older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.

- the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.

- 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.

- we put our values in the wrong things. and it lead us to very disillusioned lives.

- we’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. 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 fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.

- you can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.

- the truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. you what what really gives you satisfaction? offering others what you have to give.

- if you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. they will look down at 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.

- do the kinds 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 overwhelmed with what comes back.

- love is how to stay alive, even after you are gone.

- i believe in being fully present. that means you should be with the person you’re with.

- part of the problem, mitch, is that 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.

- in this culture, it’s so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.

- a loved one is so important. friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.

- i’ve learned this much about marriage. you get tested. you find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.

- 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. and the biggest one of those values? your belief in the importance of marriage.

- marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.

- people are only mean when they’re threatened. and when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.

- big things - know how we thing, what we value - those you must choose yourself. you can’t let anyone - or any society - determine those for you.

- every society has its own problems

- look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. we don’t see what we could be. we should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.

- living means i can be responsive to the other person. it means i can show my emotions and my feelings. talk to them. feel with them.

- don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.

- be compassionate and take responsibility for each other. if we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.

- forgive yourself before you die. then forgive othres.

- there is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. these things i so regret in my life. pride. vanity. why do we do the things we do?

- tears are okay

- you can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.

- you need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.

- people act as if death is contagious. death is as natural as life. it’s part of the deal we made.

- it’s natural to dies. 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.

- as long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. all the love you created is still there. all the memories are still there. you live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

- death ends a life, not a relationship.

- once you get your fingers on the important questions, you can’t turn away from them.

- there is no formula to relationships. they have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.

- love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.

- that’s the part of being human. stop, renew, stop, renew.

- sometimes, when you’re losing someone, you hang on to whatever tradition you can.

- there is no such thing as “too late” in life.