Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Norman Cousins (American Journalist)

Norman Cousins (1912–90) was an American political journalist and academic. This editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review for over 35 years was a tireless advocate for world peace.

Born in Union City, New Jersey, Cousins attended Teachers College, Columbia University, and began his editorial career in 1934. His selection as executive editor of Saturday Review in 1940 introduced essays that drew a link between literature and current events, helping the magazine’s circulation increase by 50 percent.

Courageous enough to criticize, Cousins was candid and blunt, and his writings were occasionally bitter. At times, he rebuked the U.S. government but felt strongly that a unique potential for greatness existed in America; he wrote The Good Inheritance: The Democratic Chance (1942) to examine this concept. In 1972, Cousins left the Saturday Review but returned in 1972, becoming editor emeritus in 1980. He also served as adjunct psychiatry and biobehavioral science professor at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Cousins wrote on diverse subjects, including the biography Albert Schweitzer’s Mission: Healing and Peace (1985) and a book of reflections on humanity in the atomic age, Modern Man Is Obsolete (1945.) Anatomy of an Illness (1979,) based on Cousins’ experience with a life-threatening illness, explores the healing ability of the human mind.

A tireless champion for world peace, Cousins dedicated much writing and study to the issues of illness and healing. Later works include Human Options (1981,) The Physician in Literature (1982,) and The Pathology of Power (1987.) Cousins’ autobiography is Present Tense: An American Editor’s Odyssey (1968.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Norman Cousins

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Fear, Anxiety

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: Kindness, Compassion

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
Norman Cousins
Topics: The Mind, 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: Optimism, Health, Consequences, Positive Attitudes

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Forgiveness, Adventure

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

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Business

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

History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
Topics: History

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Dying, Living, Death

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

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

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 growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Earth, Goals

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Perfection

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
Norman Cousins

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: Thought, Thinking, Thoughts

Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Acceptance

Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn’t really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Medicine

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Loneliness

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

Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Pessimism, Optimism

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Inaction

The essence of man is imperfection.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Perfection

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

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

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

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.
Norman Cousins
Topics: Difficulty

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
Topics: Earth, Perspective

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