MORE - Norman Cousins

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.

- Norman Cousins
 

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.

Norman Cousins

Anatomy of an Illness (1979)

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

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

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

• [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. 

Human Options (1981)

• Cynicism is intellectual treason.

• Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

• Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns.

• The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

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

• Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.