(Originally posted Tuesday, November 20, 2007)
Morrie Schwartz offered his pupil Mitch Ablom many pearls of gnomic wisdom in the classic book “Tuesdays With Morrie.” But what inspirational nuggets were left out?
–* “Death is the easy part. It’s your penis superglued to your leg that’s hard.”
–* “Once you learn how to die, it’s too late to learn how to tango. You have to do it in the right order. That’s just common sense.”
–* “It’s OK. When I made love to the rook, it was already dead.”
–* “Being is being. Being just is. A man coming at you with a machete also is, and then soon after that, you are not.”
–* “Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, not what you hear. Nor who you hear it from. Nor the inherent truth of anything perceived with the senses or the intellect or reason or judgment. And if you call that dissociative disorder or psychosis, well then, there you go.”
–* “You have to believe what you feel. Especially if it tingles and gives you shooting pains because it might be epilepsy or a mild stroke.”
–* “Life is doing, not being. So if you’re listening to this garbage, you’re already doing it all wrong.”
–* “A lot of this shit I’m saying Sartre said a lot better. I don’t know why you’re sitting here with me. You could just be looking him up in the library. He’s under ‘S’ for chrissakes.”
–* “Sometimes, for no good reason, a person should just lash out at somebody, make them cry, and ruin their day. I can’t tell you why, Mitch, but it helps.”
–* “If you love, say, a dog too much, you make it selfish, dependent, needy, spoiled and neurotic. That pretty much describes all love in a nutshell.”
–* “You must devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and helps you develop a rich internal life. I think day-trading is a fantastic way to achieve that goal.”
–* “Let love come in, but also know when to pull out. I mean, there’s a lot of pre-ejaculate in love.”
–* “Every age has its own poetry. Milton is really boring, though.”
–* “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become. Especially what they become when their plane has gone down in the Andes and they start eating each other.”
–* “The devil is an invention by those who were kept from something they wanted. The nurse who brings me my medication is not a devil. She’s just a horrible bitch with a face that looks like it was caught in a door.”
–* “Time is a function of consciousness. Watching “Jag” is a good way to kill both.”
–* “Everything has been figured out, except how to live. Pull my finger.”
Beauty is Imperfection 