Norman Cousins Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

As we enlarge our sense of the cosmos, we are enlarging our consciousness. As we extend the reach of the mind, we are learning more about our potentialities. As we move beyond the human habitat, we are gaining perspective on ourselves as custodians of the planet.

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

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

Norman Cousins
Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns.

Norman Cousins
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences—and I remind you that consequences can be both good and bad.

Norman Cousins
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 devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual.

Norman Cousins
To be able to rise from the earth; to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets; to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible; to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe

Norman Cousins
Most men think they are immortal—until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.

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

Norman Cousins
Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths.

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

Norman Cousins
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.

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

Norman Cousins
Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself.

Norman Cousins
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
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
What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.

Norman Cousins
What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.

Norman Cousins
Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness ans human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth.

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

Norman Cousins
The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind.

Norman Cousins
Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

Norman Cousins
[The recovery] began, I said, when I decided that some experts don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being. And I said I hoped they would be careful about what they said to others; they might be believed and that could be the beginning of the end.

Norman Cousins