Norman Cousins: The Direction of Hope

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

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

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

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
- Norman Cousins

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

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

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.
Norman Cousins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
Norman Cousins

Cynicism is intellectual treason.
Norman Cousins

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

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.
Norman Cousins

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

Laughter is inner jogging.
- Norman Cousins

History is a vast early warning system.
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

He who keeps his cool best wins.
Norman Cousins

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

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.
Norman Cousins

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

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

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
Norman Cousins

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

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

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

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.
Norman Cousins

Surely We will not have peace by afterthought.
Norman Cousins

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

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