Top 146 Quotes & Sayings by Norman Cousins

We will not have peace by afterthought.

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

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

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.

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.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

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.

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.

History is a vast early warning system.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

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

He who keeps his cool best wins.

Laughter is inner jogging.

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

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.

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

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

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.

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

For every low there is an equal but opposite high.

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

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

The control center of your life is your attitude.

It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.

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.

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life

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 more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical.

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.

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

Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.

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

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

The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible.

Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.

On the quality of life: #1. Realize that each human being has a built-in capacity for recuperation and repair. #2. Recognize that the quality of life is all-important. #3. Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life. #4. Nurture the regenerative and restorative forces within you. #5. Utilize laughter to create a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work for yourself and those around you. #6. Develop confidence and ability to feel love, hope and faith, and acquire a strong will to live.

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

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.

The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.

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

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