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
In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Democracy
Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Hope
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.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Deception/Lying
Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Respect
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Adventure, Forgiveness
It is nonsense to say there is not enough time to be fully informed … Time given to thought is the greatest timesaver of all.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
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
Topics: Purpose
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Conscience, Helping
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
Topics: Laughter
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Loneliness
We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy in America.
—Norman Cousins
To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Perfection
Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Acceptance
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
Topics: Compassion, Kindness
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
Topics: Habits
Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Laughter
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 death of the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Emotions
The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Earth, Goals
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.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Hope, Purpose
All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Mind, The Mind
A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Health, Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Consequences
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
—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
Topics: Progress, Self-improvement
We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Thoughts
Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Death
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
Topics: Libraries
The essence of man is imperfection.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Perfection
History is a vast early warning system.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: History
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.
—Norman Cousins
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Health, Choice
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Carl Bernstein American Journalist
- Midge Decter American Journalist
- Walter Lippmann American Journalist
- B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Lincoln Steffens American Journalist
- Shana Alexander American Journalist
- H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
- James Fallows American Author
- Gail Sheehy American Writer, Journalist
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