A Quote by Norman Cousins

Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is. — © Norman Cousins
Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
People always try to palm me weed when I'm always talking about how I don't smoke weed. But they always try to ... and when they stop offering me weed, then I'm going to feel kind of out of touch, like: "What did I do wrong that you won't offer me drugs that I don't do?" Because I'll trade those drugs out for drugs that I do do.
Man must learn to believe in that which he does not, at the moment, see in order to grant himself that which he desires to have. Man's prayers are always answered, for he always receives that which he believes. The law that governs prayer is impersonal. Belief is the condition necessary to realize the desire. No amount of pleas or ritual will bring about the fulfillment of your desires other than the belief that you are or have that which you want.
No longer what your belief about yourself is - if you've always been poor, if you've always been overweight, if you've always had rotten relationships, if your luck hasn't been good, if you don't attract into your life the things you want, if you've always been shy or always been aggressive - whatever it is and however long you've held it, the belief that you can't change it is not aligned with Source. Source says you can be anything. You can do anything. You're infinite.
I have always been very interested in the issue of drugs, because as much as illegal drugs are prosecuted, if you think of it as a health issue, the real killer are prescription drugs, like over prescribing of opioids.
The cheats always have a way of justifying their behaviour - everyone else is getting away with it, so why shouldn't I? But because they're so reliant on the drugs - and the drugs are not always perfect, you're not guaranteed to peak at a big event - they don't have the confidence to look in the mirror and know that they can go out and give their best. If you're clean and you've prepared well for a race, that's where you have an edge.
You can forget about recovery. There is no recovery - and there's not going to be any recovery. Recovery is an impossibility.
As long as you can walk the street and you know there's a tomorrow, there's always that chance. That's how I've always been. I've always had complete belief that I would make something out of myself again, because to me, it's always been about accomplishment.
This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
Self belief will always push fear away, but you need to always practice self belief otherwise fear will come back and tap you on the shoulder.
The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.
But my activities have been pretty much focused in the last almost 30 years on the recovery, of my own recovery, the understanding for my family of my recovery.
Patients who face long odds and terminal illnesses do not always have access to the latest drugs in clinical trials. They don't want to give up, but they don't have years to wait for new drugs to receive FDA approval.
A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.
I'm not a marijuana user, so I always feel kind of fraudulent. I applaud this, I do recreational drugs, but marijuana's never one of those. People think because I talk about drugs, that I smoke pot. But I don't.
I have always had a deep belief that every movie, every artistic expression, is political. Don't be fooled. Even ones that we wouldn't consider overtly political are political. When we spend time doing anything, whether it's distraction or whether it's something that we have to face, it is always political. That's my belief.
The necessary precondition for the birth of science as we know it is, it would seem, the diffusion through society of the belief that the universe is both rational and contingent. Such a belief is the presupposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask: Upon what is this belief founded?
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