Norman Cousins - Human Options (1981)

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

Norman Cousins

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

Norman Cousins

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

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

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

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