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(no category)
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War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
-Norman Cousins
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Action(s)
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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
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Belief
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Drugs are not always necessary, but belief in recovery always is.
-Norman Cousins
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Consequences
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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.
-Norman Cousins
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Death
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Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
-Norman Cousins, Saturday Review - editorial
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Deception/Lying
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The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.
-Norman Cousins, Pathology of Power
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Habits
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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
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History
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History is a vast early warning system.
-Norman Cousins
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Kindness
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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
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Laughter
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Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
-Norman Cousins
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Libraries
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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, American Library Association Bulletin, October, 1954
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Life
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Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-Norman Cousins
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Loneliness
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The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
-Norman Cousins
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Medicine
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Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body.
-Norman Cousins
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Mind, the
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All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
-Norman Cousins
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Pessimism
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Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
-Norman Cousins
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Progress
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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
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Purpose
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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
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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
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Thought
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We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.
-Norman Cousins
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Tragedy
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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
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Training
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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
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Will, Willpower
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Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will.
-Norman Cousins
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Wisdom
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Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
-Norman Cousins
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Books by and about Norman Cousins