Daily Inspiration Quote by Morrie Schwartz

Self-pity gets a bad rap in American life, filed under weakness or indulgence. Morrie Schwartz flips that reflex: don’t suppress your grief, rehearse it. “Not once or twice, but again and again” reads like a permission slip and a provocation. The repetition is the point. He’s not prescribing melodrama; he’s arguing that grief isn’t a task you complete, it’s a practice you return to, like physical therapy for the soul.

Schwartz, best known through Tuesdays with Morrie as a warm, plainspoken educator facing ALS, had a gift for making hard truths sound disarmingly simple. The line’s intent is self-directed compassion with teeth: mourn for yourself as an act of honesty, not vanity. The subtext pushes against a culture that treats discomfort as a glitch to be optimized away. When he says “for yourself,” he’s refusing the moral hierarchy that elevates grieving others as noble while shaming private sorrow as selfish. Your losses count even when no one else crowns them with significance.

Context matters: a teacher confronting bodily decline and the shrinking of a life. In that situation, grief comes in waves, not chapters. “Again and again” acknowledges that denial isn’t cured by one brave conversation; it returns with every new limitation, every fresh reminder. Schwartz’s broader ethic is that feeling fully is how you stay human under pressure. Mourning becomes a way to metabolize fear, to stop wasting energy pretending you’re fine, and to make room for whatever comes next: connection, humor, tenderness, even joy.