Norman Cousins Quotes - Page 5

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.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

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.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.

The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners of this planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself.

Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him.

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.

I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.

History is an accumulation of error.

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

The great challenge of the '90s... is to salvage and improve the UN and to develop it into an agency capable of meeting the wide range of serious problems that are inherent in a world that has become a single geographic unit.

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

More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.

It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.

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.

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 physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.

Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.

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

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness . . . Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.