Top 120 Norman Cousins Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.”

— Norman Cousins

105. “To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.”

— Norman Cousins

106. “Death is not the ultimate tragedy of life. The ultimate tragedy is depersonalization – dying in an alien and sterile area, separated from the spiritual nourishment that comes from being able to reach out to a loving hand, separated from the desire to experience the things that make life worth living, separated from hope.”

— Norman Cousins

107. “All men – whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans – have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.”

— Norman Cousins

108. “Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.”

— Norman Cousins

109. “My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.”

— Norman Cousins

110. “The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.”

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

112. “The physician’s ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body’s own healing system.”

— Norman Cousins

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.”

— Norman Cousins

120. “Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

— Norman Cousins

121. “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

122. “The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners of this planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble.”

— Norman Cousins

123. “The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.”

— Norman Cousins

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Time is the one thing that patients need most from their doctors – time to be heard, time to have things explained, time to reassured, time to be introduced by the doctor personally to specialists or other attendants whose very existence seems to reflect something new and threatening. yet the one thing that too many doctors find most difficult to command or manage is time.”

— Norman Cousins

127. “If ignorance about the nature of pain is widespread, ignorance about the way pain-killing drugs is even more so. What is not generally understood is that many of the vaunted pain-killing drugs conceal the pain without correcting the underlying condition. They deaden the mechanism in the body that alerts the brain to the fact that something may be wrong. The body can pay a high price for suppression of pain without regard to its basic cause.”

— Norman Cousins

128. “Some people don’t really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.”

— Norman Cousins

129. “Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.”

— Norman Cousins

130. “A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts.”

— Norman Cousins

131. “It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.”

— Norman Cousins

132. “Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?”

— Norman Cousins