Top 447 Quotes & Sayings by Mitch Albom - Page 3

There's a story behind everything..but behind all your stories is always your mother's story..because hers is where yours begins.

What's wrong with being number 2?

I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can't remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself.

the pain we suffer is a way to make us appreciate what comes next.

When you are measuring life, you are not living it.

If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love, and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of ‘I could have, I should have’. We can sleep in a storm. And when its time, our goodbyes will be complete.

Scenery without solace is meaningless.

One day can bend your life.

I don't know what it is about 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.

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.

The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.

Consider the word “time.” We use so many phrases with it. Pass time. Waste time. Kill time. Lose time. In good time. About time. Take your time. Save time. A long time. Right on time. Out of time. Mind the time. Be on time. Spare time. Keep time. Stall for time. There are as many expressions with “time” as there are minutes in a day. But once, there was no word for it at all. Because no one was counting. Then Dor began. And everything changed.

Once heaven is done with grandma, we'd like her back, thanks.

Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine?

There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.

In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.

Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world

We cannot stop what Heaven chooses.

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

sometimes what you miss the most is the way a loved one made you feel about yourself.

Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love, and a peaceful heart.

"You marked the minutes," the old man said. "But did you use them wisely? To be still? To cherish? To be grateful? To lift and be lifted?"

Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.

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.

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

If we knew what comes next, we never would have worried.

Don't let our outside labels or how fervent we look or zealous we are or how righteous we seem; that's not how you measure yourself against other people. Everyone is a child of God; if we really believed that, we'd treat each other better.

When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.

Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.

I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.

You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.

People are only mean when they are threatened.

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.

Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.

The most important elements of faith [are] believing in something bigger than yourself, taking care of those less fortunate than you.

You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can’t trade them in. You can’t lie to them. You can’t run two at once, substituting back and forth. “Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.

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.

Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.

Sometimes, kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.

If you could pack for heaven, this was how you'd do it, touching everything, taking nothing.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

Going back to something is harder than you think.

A man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.

But my father, a thief in many ways, had robbed me of my concentration.

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

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

No story sits by itself, Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

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."

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.

I'm being made aware of my mortality all the time.

Fairness, does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young. ~ The blue man

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. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.

Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.

Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Daxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions are spent purchasing them. You don't even need a specific trauma, just 'general depression' is enough, or anxiety, as if sadness is as treatable as the common cold.

As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity.

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

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

And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

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

Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.