Top 120 Norman Cousins Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”

— Norman Cousins

52. “The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.”

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

54. “Cynicism is intellectual treason.”

— Norman Cousins

55. “Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life.”

— Norman Cousins

56. “History is an accumulation of error.”

— Norman Cousins

57. “Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.”

— Norman Cousins

58. “A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.”

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

61. “Nixon’s motto was, if two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.”

— Norman Cousins

62. “The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.”

— Norman Cousins

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “If news is not really news unless it is bad news, it may be difficult to claim we are an informed nation.”

— Norman Cousins

71. “People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.”

— Norman Cousins

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.”

— Norman Cousins

76. “An adequate share of humor and laughter represents an essential part of the diet of the healthy person.”

— Norman Cousins

77. “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

78. “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

79. “The need is to recognize that The patient is the healer, Not the doctor.”

— Norman Cousins

80. “The life-force may be the least understood force on earth.”

— Norman Cousins

81. “War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.”

— Norman Cousins

82. “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

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

— Norman Cousins

84. “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

85. “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

86. “We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.”

— Norman Cousins

87. “I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.”

— Norman Cousins

88. “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

89. “We will not have peace by afterthought.”

— Norman Cousins

90. “We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.”

— Norman Cousins

91. “The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.”

— Norman Cousins

92. “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

93. “More and more, the choice for the world’s people is between world warriors and world citizens.”

— Norman Cousins

94. “Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.”

— Norman Cousins

95. “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

96. “It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today’s world.”

— Norman Cousins

97. “The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.”

— Norman Cousins

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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