Norman Cousins

We will not have peace by afterthought.

Laughter is inner jogging.

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

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.

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.

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

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

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

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis – once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

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.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

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

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.

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.

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

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

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

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

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.

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.

He who keeps his cool best wins.

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.

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.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

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?

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

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

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 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.

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

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

History is a vast early warning system.