Death is not the ultimate tragedy of life. The ultimate tragedy is depersonalization – dying in an alien and sterile area, separated from the spiritual nourishment that comes from being able to reach out to a loving hand, separated from the desire to experience the things that make life worth living, separated from hope.

— Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins Quotes

More and more, the choice for the world’s people is between world warriors and world citizens.

— Norman Cousins

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

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.

— Norman Cousins

Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths.

— Norman Cousins

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.

— Norman Cousins

The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.

— Norman Cousins

The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.

— Norman Cousins

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.

— Norman Cousins

Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity.

— Norman Cousins

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life.

— Norman Cousins

I’ve learned that next to the atomic bomb, the greatest danger is defeatism, despair, and inadequate awareness of what human beings possess. I feel that any problem that can be defined is capable of being resolved. Out of this has come my conviction that no person knows enough to be a pessimist.

— Norman Cousins

Death is not the ultimate tragedy of life. The ultimate tragedy is depersonalization – dying in an alien and sterile area, separated from the spiritual nourishment that comes from being able to reach out to a loving hand, separated from the desire to experience the things that make life worth living, separated from hope.

— Norman Cousins

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

— Norman Cousins

If ignorance about the nature of pain is widespread, ignorance about the way pain-killing drugs is even more so. What is not generally understood is that many of the vaunted pain-killing drugs conceal the pain without correcting the underlying condition. They deaden the mechanism in the body that alerts the brain to the fact that something may be wrong. The body can pay a high price for suppression of pain without regard to its basic cause.

— Norman Cousins

Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.

— Norman Cousins

Time is the one thing that patients need most from their doctors – time to be heard, time to have things explained, time to reassured, time to be introduced by the doctor personally to specialists or other attendants whose very existence seems to reflect something new and threatening. yet the one thing that too many doctors find most difficult to command or manage is time.

— Norman Cousins

A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts.

— Norman Cousins
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