Quotes by Norman Cousins

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

“Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions”

“Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Optimism doesnt wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.”

“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Laughter is inner jogging.”

“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.”

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

“No one really knows enough to be a pessimist”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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