Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.

On the quality of life: #1. Realize that each human being has a built-in capacity for recuperation and repair. #2. Recognize that the quality of life is all-important. #3. Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life. #4. Nurture the regenerative and restorative forces within you. #5. Utilize laughter to create a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work for yourself and those around you. #6. Develop confidence and ability to feel love, hope and faith, and acquire a strong will to live.

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.

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.

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.

We will not have peace by afterthought.