Norman Cousins famous quotes

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.
-- Norman Cousins

#Dream #Fear #Insecure

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
-- Norman Cousins

#Life #Achievement #Immortality

The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth.
-- Norman Cousins

#Adventure #Mind #Growth

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-- Norman Cousins

#Inspirational #Life #Heartbreak

He who keeps his cool best wins.
-- Norman Cousins

#Winning #Literature

Laughter is inner jogging.
-- Norman Cousins

#Happiness #Laughter #Laughing

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions
-- Norman Cousins

#Positive #Powerful #Laughter

Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
-- Norman Cousins

#Recovery #Drug #Care

The control center of your life is your attitude.
-- Norman Cousins

#Life #Attitude #Life Is

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
-- Norman Cousins

#Inspirational #Forgiveness #Life Changing

In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
-- Norman Cousins

#Freedom #Responsibility #Democracy

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
-- Norman Cousins

#Food #Health #Doctors

It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.
-- Norman Cousins

#Health #Healing #Doctors

Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.
-- Norman Cousins

#Laughter #Moving #Expectations

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.
-- Norman Cousins

#Hope #Live Life #Facts

Time given to thought is the greatest time saver of all.
-- Norman Cousins

#Thinking #Given

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
-- Norman Cousins

#Kindness #Work #Mean

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.
-- Norman Cousins

#Hope #Independent #Literature

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
-- Norman Cousins

#Failure #Fate #Destiny

Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.
-- Norman Cousins

#Gun #Survival #Bigs

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
-- Norman Cousins

#Book #Reading #Ideas

Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
-- Norman Cousins

#Wisdom #Trying #Diagnosis

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

#Men #May #Facts

Pain is part of the body's magic. It is the way the body transmits a sign to the brain that something is wrong.
-- Norman Cousins

#Pain #Brain #Magic

Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
-- Norman Cousins

#Motivational #Progress #Belief

Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
-- Norman Cousins

#Laughter #Healthy #Way

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.
-- Norman Cousins

#Laughter #Humor #Exercise

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
-- Norman Cousins

#Faith #Reason

If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it.
-- Norman Cousins

#Believe #Fighting #Unesco

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.
-- Norman Cousins

#Loss #Literature #Causes

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.
-- Norman Cousins

#Life #Hope #Powerful

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.
-- Norman Cousins

#Book #Reading #Writing

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
-- Norman Cousins

#Senior #Country #Business

A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.
-- Norman Cousins

#Fashion #Thinking #Dwelling

Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.
-- Norman Cousins

#Pain #Laughter #Sleep

The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical.
-- Norman Cousins

#Spiritual #Get Well #Fighting

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope
-- Norman Cousins

#Motivational #Powerful #Body

The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.
-- Norman Cousins

#War #Justice #Obsession

Laughter is a form of internal jogging.
-- Norman Cousins

#Laughter #Jogging #Aging

The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible.
-- Norman Cousins

#World #Belief #Starting

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
-- Norman Cousins

#Missing You #Heartbroken #Loneliness

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
-- Norman Cousins

#Motivational #Wisdom #Entrepreneur

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
-- Norman Cousins

#Respect #Men #Fragility

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
-- Norman Cousins

#Book #Ideas #Library

Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
-- Norman Cousins

#May #Diagnosis #Negative

No one really knows enough to be a pessimist.
-- Norman Cousins

#Enough #Pessimist

All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.
-- Norman Cousins

#Men #Names #Chinese

The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.
-- Norman Cousins

#Leadership #Sports #Boredom

The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.
-- Norman Cousins

#Medicine #Needs #Architect

Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.
-- Norman Cousins

#Determination #Purpose #Connections

Education fails unless the Three R's at one end of the school spectrum lead ultimately to the Four P's at the other-Preparati on for Earning, Preparation for Living, Preparation for Understanding, Preparation for Participation in the problems involved in the making of a better world.
-- Norman Cousins

#School #Understanding #Preparation

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.
-- Norman Cousins

#Facts #Facts Of Life #Significant

History is an accumulation of error.
-- Norman Cousins

#Errors #History #Accumulation

It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.
-- Norman Cousins

#Depression #Hate #Frustration

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.
-- Norman Cousins

#Enemy #Constant

The essence of man is imperfection.
-- Norman Cousins

#Acceptance #Men #Essence

Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.
-- Norman Cousins

#Happiness #Laughter #Humans

What people most need now is to apply their conversion skills to those things that are essential for their survival. They need to convert facts into logic, free will into purpose, conscience into decision. They need to convert historical experience into a design for a sane world.
-- Norman Cousins

#Skills #Perspective #People

The need is not to amputate the ego ... but to transcend it.
-- Norman Cousins

#Ego #Needs

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.
-- Norman Cousins

#Home #Practice #Decision

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
-- Norman Cousins

#Brain #Input #Body

It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.
-- Norman Cousins

#Education #Today #Privilege

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.
-- Norman Cousins

#Men #Essence #Evil

Intelligence and the spirit of adventure can be combined to create new energies, and out of these energies may come exciting and rewarding new prospects.
-- Norman Cousins

#Adventure #May #Energy

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.
-- Norman Cousins

#Artist #Creative #May

Pessimism is a waste of time.
-- Norman Cousins

#Waste #Wasting Time #Pessimism

The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
-- Norman Cousins

#War #Effectiveness #Possibility

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.
-- Norman Cousins

#Spring #Self #People

The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.
-- Norman Cousins

#Moving #Men #Essence

The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nontheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
-- Norman Cousins

#Thinking #People #Design

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.
-- Norman Cousins

#Men #Definitions #Gains

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.
-- Norman Cousins

#Self #Despair #Trouble

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
-- Norman Cousins

#Men #Perfection #Needs

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
-- Norman Cousins

#Senior #Country #Government

I've learned that next to the atomic bomb, the greatest danger is defeatism, despair, and inadequate awareness of what human beings possess. I feel that any problem that can be defined is capable of being resolved. Out of this has come my conviction that no person knows enough to be a pessimist.
-- Norman Cousins

#Despair #Bombs #Next

We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy in America.
-- Norman Cousins

#Philosophy #Mistake #America

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.
-- Norman Cousins

#Size #Purpose #Problem

The life-force may be the least understood force on earth.
-- Norman Cousins

#May #Earth #Force

The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.
-- Norman Cousins

#Heart #People #Matter

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

#Father #Choices #Atheism