Norman Cousins Quotes

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

"The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us"

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

"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."

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

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

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

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness."

"Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions"

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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 in it. Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully."

"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."