Norman Cousins Quotes

The essence of man is imperfection.

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

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness ... Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.

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

He who keeps his cool best wins.

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.

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.

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

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions.

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.

Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity.

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.

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.

Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.

The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force.

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

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

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.

Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity.

Some people don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

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.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.

The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us

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.

Fortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of inter-relationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival.

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

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

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

The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment.

Infinity converts the possible into the inevitable.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations- plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.

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

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.

Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.

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.

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.

The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.

At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"

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

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

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.

Belief becomes biology.

We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.

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

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

The need is to recognize that The patient is the healer, Not the doctor.

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life

Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.

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.

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.

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

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

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.

Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.

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.

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

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

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

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 (in his; Anatomy of an Illness)

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

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

We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.

Laughter is a form of internal jogging.

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.

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness

The great challenge of the '90s ... is to salvage and improve the UN and to develop it into an agency capable of meeting the wide range of serious problems that are inherent in a world that has become a single geographic unit.

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.

A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.

The control center of your life is your attitude.

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

Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.

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

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.

An adequate share of humor and laughter represents an essential part of the diet of the healthy person.

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.

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.

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

Pessimism is a waste of time.

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.

The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

All things are possible, once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.

The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.

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

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.

Laughter may or may not activate the endorphins or enhance respiration, as some medical researchers contend. What seems clear, however, is that laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic.

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.

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.

I am a single cell in the body of four billion cells. The body is humankind. I am a single cell. My needs are individual but they are not unique. I am interlocked with other human beings in the consequences of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. I will work for human unity and human peace; for a moral order in harmony with the order of the universe. Together we share the quest for a society of the whole equal to our needs, a society in which we need not live beneath our moral capacity, and in which justice has a life of its own. We are single cells in a body of four billion cells. The body is humankind.
Norman Cousins, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, 1981

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.