110+ Norman Cousins Quotes On Pain, Death And Mental Illness

Norman Cousins was an American author, political journalist, and professor. He was best known for his book Anatomy of an Illness, which detailed his struggle and eventual recovery from a debilitating illness. Cousins was also a pioneer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, which studies the connection between the mind and body and how they affect health. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Norman Cousins on life, pain, death.

Top 10 Norman Cousins Quotes

1. Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
2. People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.
3. Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
4. Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.
5. Laughter is inner jogging.
6. If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
7. A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
8. Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
9. 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?
10. Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

Norman Cousins Short Quotes

• Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
• Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
• 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.
• War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
• History is a vast early warning system.
• The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us
• Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
• Cynicism is intellectual treason.
• Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

Norman Cousins Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity. — Norman Cousins

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life. — 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

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. — Norman Cousins

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

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

Norman Cousins Quotes About Pain

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

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

A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure. — Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins Quotes About Death

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

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living? — Norman Cousins

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is. — Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins Quotes About Laughter

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions — Norman Cousins

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

Laughter serves as a blocking agent. Like a bullet-proof vest, it may help protect you against the ravages of negative emotions that can assault you in disease. — Norman Cousins

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

An adequate share of humor and laughter represents an essential part of the diet of the healthy person. — Norman Cousins

Laughter may or may not activate the endorphins or enhance respiration, as some medical researchers contend. What seems clear, however, is that laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic. — Norman Cousins

Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top. — Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins Quotes About An Illness

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. — Norman Cousins

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

Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding. — Norman Cousins

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

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness . . . Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition. — Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins Quotes About Live

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

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

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

Norman Cousins Quotes About People

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness. — Norman Cousins

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

The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community. — Norman Cousins

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

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

More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens. — Norman Cousins

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

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

Norman Cousins Quotes About World

It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world. — Norman Cousins

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

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

The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible. — Norman Cousins

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

Norman Cousins Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

To be able to rise from the earth; to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets; to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible; to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe — 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

In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility. — 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

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

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

Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system. — 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

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

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

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. 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

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

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

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

We will not have peace by afterthought. — Norman Cousins

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope — 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

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

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

The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession. — Norman Cousins

Pessimism is a waste of time. — Norman Cousins

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country. — Norman Cousins

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

It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body. — Norman Cousins

You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow. — Norman Cousins

The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nontheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time. — Norman Cousins

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties. — Norman Cousins

The need is to recognize that The patient is the healer, Not the doctor. — Norman Cousins

Drugs are not always necessary, but belief in recovery always is. — Norman Cousins

Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations- plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology. — Norman Cousins

Infinity converts the possible into the inevitable. — Norman Cousins

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

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

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing. — Norman Cousins

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic. — Norman Cousins

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

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body. — Norman Cousins

Belief creates biology. — Norman Cousins

The control center of your life is your attitude. — Norman Cousins

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

The essence of man is imperfection. — Norman Cousins

No one really knows enough to be a pessimist... — Norman Cousins

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life — Norman Cousins

We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought. — Norman Cousins

All things are possible, once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake. — Norman Cousins

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

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

Nature has not been lavish in her endowments, but each person has his or her own potential in terms of achievement and service. The awareness of that potential is the discovery of purpose; the fulfillment of that potential is the discovery of strength. — Norman Cousins

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

Life Lessons by Norman Cousins

1. Norman Cousins taught us to never give up hope, no matter what life throws at us. He showed us that laughter is a powerful antidote to stress and sorrow, and that it can be a source of strength and resilience. Lastly, he demonstrated the importance of maintaining a positive attitude and outlook, no matter how difficult life may seem.