Mitch Albom Quotes

I have a lot of success and make a good living, but after while, you start going 'Why? Why are you doing all this?'

The key is to figure out what you want out of life, not what you want out of your career.

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

A lot of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute struggles are a bit more taken care of, so it allows you to start asking more existential questions like, "What do I want in life? What's going to make me happy?"

You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life - so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.'

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.

We should provide the meaning of the universe in the meaning of our own lives. So I think science doesn't necessarily have to get in the way of kind of spiritual fulfillment.

The question is not... if art is enough to fulfill my life, but if I am true to the path I have set for myself, if I am the best I can be in the things I do. Am I living up to the reasons I became a singer in the first place?

The questions I'm asking myself are, 'What makes me happy? Where do I want to be? What will make me happy at 50, 60 and 70?'

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

You come to a point where you realize your work doesn't save you.

I really don't want the highlight of my life to be my success as an investor. Genuinely. My idea of death would be that person who is still telling you about that goal he scored in 1974.

Everything I do is somehow rooted in humanity. It's always about people; it's always about ego. It's always about desperation. It's quite existential. You know, 'Am I leading a good life?' That might be because I'm an atheist, and I think this is all we've got, so you better be nice. And have fun.

We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

Figure out what questions you'd ask to see if you were happy with your life. Then wake up every day and live intentionally, so you're happy with the answers at the end.

You have to have something in your life that's more important than the work. People don't really like to admit that. They say, 'Oh, my work is my most important thing.'

I'm very happy with where I arrived, both personally and professionally. I can say more so personally, because my career will have to end eventually. I do not know how long it will be, but eventually it will end, and the personal will continue.

Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.

I'm basically a happy person. I'm content with my life and my wife and my family. But you do reach a point where you start to question the absolutes that are supposedly out there, and you realize that there simply are no absolutes.