Norman Cousins - Life Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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