Quotes from Norman Cousins

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

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

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

The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical.

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.

Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.

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

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

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life

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

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.

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

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.

Pessimism is a waste of time.

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

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.

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.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

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.

Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.

The most costly disease is not cancer or coronaries. The most costly disease is boredom - costly for both individual and society.

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.