Norman Cousins, as he opens The Celebration of Life
“
One grows into one’s philosophy. Year by year an individual is shaped by the sights, the sounds, the ideas around him. Consciously or not, he is forever adding to or subtracting from the sum total of his beliefs or attitudes or responses, or whatever it is we mean when we say that a man has a certain outlook on life… In this sense, each human being is a process- a filtering process of retention or rejection, absorption or loss. The process gives him individuality. It determines whether he justifies the gift of human life or whether he lives and dies without having been affected by the beauty of wonder and the wonder of beauty, without having had any real awareness of kinship or human fulfillment.
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