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Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him.

Norman Cousins

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Norman Cousins
Age: 75 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 30
Journalist
Literary Critic
Peace Activist
Professor
Writer
Union City
New Jersey
May
Command
Men
Supreme
Although
Meaning
Hold
Existence
Fact
Facts
Jurisdiction

More quotes by Norman Cousins

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What was significant about the laughter . . . was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person . . . form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.
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All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
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Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.
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Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.
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We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.
Norman Cousins
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The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
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Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.
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Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
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The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us
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The great challenge of the '90s... is to salvage and improve the UN and to develop it into an agency capable of meeting the wide range of serious problems that are inherent in a world that has become a single geographic unit.
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You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.
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Integration is a basic law of life when we resist it, disintegration is the natural result, both inside and outside of us. Thus we come to the concept of harmony through integration.
Norman Cousins
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We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.
Norman Cousins
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Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations- plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.
Norman Cousins
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Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties.
Norman Cousins
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More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.
Norman Cousins
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Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
Norman Cousins
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I have learned never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate - even when prospects seem most wretched. The life force may be the least understood force on earth.
Norman Cousins
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The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins
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Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions
Norman Cousins