Quotes by Norman Cousins

• The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
• Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
• People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.
• My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
• Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
• 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.
• Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
• 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.
• The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
• 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.
• We will not have peace by afterthought.
• 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.
• 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?
• Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.
• 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.
• 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.
• Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
• Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
• He who keeps his cool best wins.
• 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.
• Laughter is inner jogging.
• 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 his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.
• A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
• 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.
• Cynicism is intellectual treason.
• Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
• Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
• History is a vast early warning system.
• Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.
• If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
• 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.
• It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.
• 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.
• Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.