Norman Cousins Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Norman Cousins
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.

Norman Cousins
Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.... It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.

Norman Cousins
The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

Norman Cousins
I have learned that life is an adventure in forgiveness. Nothing clutters the soul more than remorse, resentment, recrimination.

Norman Cousins
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
The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.

Norman Cousins
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.

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

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

Norman Cousins
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
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.

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

Norman Cousins
If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.

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

Norman Cousins
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
The justification for exploring the cosmos rests not on tangible benefits, but on philosophical grounds and on our instinctive need to evolve.

Norman Cousins
Infinity converts the possible into the inevitable.

Norman Cousins
More and more, the choice for the world's people is between world warriors and world citizens.

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

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

Norman Cousins
It is unscientific to say that within the many billions of galactic systems, ours is the only planet that supports life in advanced form. Nature shuns one of a kind as much as it abhors a vacuum. Given infinite time and space, anything that occurs at one place or time in the universe will occur elsewhere or "elsewhen."

Norman Cousins
The physician knows that his little black bag can carry him only so far and that the body's own healing system is the main resource.

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

Norman Cousins
The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.

Norman Cousins