Top 100 Norman Cousins Sayings
#1. 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)
Norman Cousins
#2. Progress is possible only when people believe in the possibilities of growth and change. Races or tribes die out not just when they are conquered and suppressed but when they accept their defeated condition, become despairing, and lose their excitement about the future. Norman Cousins Americans
Howard Bloom
#3. 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
#4. The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.
Norman Cousins
#5. The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.
Norman Cousins
#6. Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.
Norman Cousins
#7. 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.
Norman Cousins
#8. 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.
Norman Cousins
#9. The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.
Norman Cousins
#11. The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.
Norman Cousins
#12. Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.
Norman Cousins
#13. A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.
Norman Cousins
#15. The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners of this planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble.
Norman Cousins
#17. Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.
Norman Cousins
#18. 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
#19. 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.
Norman Cousins
#20. 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.
Norman Cousins
#21. Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
Norman Cousins
#22. What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.
Norman Cousins
#23. 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.
Norman Cousins
#24. 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
#25. Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions
Norman Cousins
#26. More and more, the choice for the world's people is between world warriors and world citizens.
Norman Cousins
#27. You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.
Norman Cousins
#29. Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
Norman Cousins
#30. The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth.
Norman Cousins
#31. The need is not to amputate the ego ... but to transcend it.
Norman Cousins
#32. 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?"
Norman Cousins
#33. 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
#35. Education fails unless the Three R's at one end of the school spectrum lead ultimately to the Four P's at the other-Preparati on for Earning, Preparation for Living, Preparation for Understanding, Preparation for Participation in the problems involved in the making of a better world.
Norman Cousins
#36. 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
#37. If news is not really news unless it is bad news, it may be difficult to claim we are an informed nation
Norman Cousins
#38. 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.
Norman Cousins
#39. Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
Norman Cousins
#40. The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.
Norman Cousins
#41. Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
Norman Cousins
#42. 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.
Norman Cousins
#43. Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
Norman Cousins
#44. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
Norman Cousins
#45. 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
#46. 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.
Norman Cousins
#47. What was significant about the laughter ... was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person ... form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.
Norman Cousins
#48. Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life.
Norman Cousins
#49. I've learned that next to the atomic bomb, the greatest danger is defeatism, despair, and inadequate awareness of what human beings possess. I feel that any problem that can be defined is capable of being resolved. Out of this has come my conviction that no person knows enough to be a pessimist.
Norman Cousins
#50. The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice ... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.
Norman Cousins
#51. The life-force may be the least understood force on earth.
Norman Cousins
#52. It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.
Norman Cousins
#53. Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
Norman Cousins
#54. The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible.
Norman Cousins
#55. For every low there is an equal but opposite high.
Norman Cousins
#56. 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
#57. Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
Norman Cousins
#58. My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
Norman Cousins
#59. 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.
Norman Cousins
#60. All things are possible, once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.
Norman Cousins
#61. 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.
Norman Cousins
#62. All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.
Norman Cousins
#63. 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.
Norman Cousins
#64. War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
Norman Cousins
#65. The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.
Norman Cousins
#66. 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
#67. 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.
Norman Cousins
#68. 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.
Norman Cousins
#69. The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins
#70. 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?
Norman Cousins
#71. Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.
Norman Cousins
#72. 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.
Norman Cousins
#74. 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
#75. It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.
Norman Cousins
#76. A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.
Norman Cousins
#77. 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.
Norman Cousins
#78. If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
Norman Cousins
#79. 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.
Norman Cousins
#80. Pain is part of the body's magic. It is the way the body transmits a sign to the brain that something is wrong.
Norman Cousins
#81. 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.
Norman Cousins
#82. The need is to recognize that The patient is the healer, Not the doctor.
Norman Cousins
#83. In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
Norman Cousins
#84. 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.
Norman Cousins
#85. It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.
Norman Cousins
#86. The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.
Norman Cousins
#87. But we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all. In the spirit of this passage, the editor has taken the liberty of editing Mr. Cousins' language to make it more gender inclusive.
Norman Cousins
#88. 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.
Norman Cousins
#89. 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.
Norman Cousins
#90. 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
#91. The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.
Norman Cousins
#92. 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.
Norman Cousins
#93. Infinity converts the possible into the inevitable.
Norman Cousins
#96. Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
Norman Cousins
#97. The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
Norman Cousins
#98. Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
Norman Cousins
#99. An adequate share of humor and laughter represents an essential part of the diet of the healthy person.
Norman Cousins
#100. Some people don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.
Norman Cousins
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