The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.
Interpretation
Family provides a crucial sense of stability and support in life.
Morrie Schwartz emphasizes the idea that in a constantly changing world, the family unit serves as the most reliable and secure foundation for individuals. It highlights the importance of familial bonds and support as essential for navigating life's uncertainties.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of maintaining close bonds, one can use this quote to underline the necessity of family.
People are only mean when they're threatened… and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.
The best way to deal with that is to live in a fully conscious, compassionate, loving way. Don't wait until you're on your deathbed to recognize that this is the only way to live.
Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer more than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims....and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don't know any of these people. But - how can I put this? I'm almost......drawn to them.
Do the kind 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 overhelmed with what comes back
It’s natural to die. 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.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
When you become a parent, you leave a lot of things behind and refocus, maybe on how simple life really is and what few things there really are to worry about. And everything else can go by the wayside.
I made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But all I want in this world is for my kids to say, 'He was a Hall of Fame dad.'
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
People had always vaguely mentioned that when you have children, how part of your life would stop. But they don't say that some other extraordinary part of your life opens up.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
I've seen fathers criticizing their sons the moment a game's over. Not my dad. It doesn't matter if I threw an interception or a Hail Mary, he always says, 'Good job, son, I'm proud of you.' Then he shakes my hand and gives me a hug. Every time.
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