Norman Cousins Quotes

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.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

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.

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.

[The recovery] began, I said, when I decided that some experts don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being. And I said I hoped they would be careful about what they said to others; they might be believed and that could be the beginning of the end.

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

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

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.

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

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

The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nontheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

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

Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness ans human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth.