Norman Cousins
No one really knows enough to be a pessimist.Collection: Inspirational
If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.Collection: Peace
For every low there is an equal but opposite high.Collection: Equality
The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.Collection: Self
The need is not to amputate the ego ... but to transcend it.Collection: Ego
The essence of man is imperfection.Collection: Acceptance
Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.Collection: Writing
The physician knows that his little black bag can carry him only so far and that the body's own healing system is the main resource.Collection: Healing
The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.Collection: War
What was significant about the laughter . . . was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person . . . form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.Collection: Laughter
I have learned never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate - even when prospects seem most wretched. The life force may be the least understood force on earth.Collection: Mind
Humanity today is not safe in the presence of humanity. The old cannibalism has given way to anonymous action in which the killer and the killed do not know each other, and in which,indeed, the very fact of mass death has the effect of making mass killing less reprehensible than the death of a single individual. In short, we have evolved in every respect except our ability to protect ourselves against human intelligence. Our knowledge is vast but does not embrace the workings of peace.Collection: Peace
Intelligence and the spirit of adventure can be combined to create new energies, and out of these energies may come exciting and rewarding new prospects.Collection: Adventure
What people most need now is to apply their conversion skills to those things that are essential for their survival. They need to convert facts into logic, free will into purpose, conscience into decision. They need to convert historical experience into a design for a sane world.Collection: Skills
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.Collection: Thinking
The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.Collection: Editing
The life-force may be the least understood force on earth.Collection: Earth
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.Collection: Recovery
In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.Collection: Freedom
All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.Collection: Men
Infinity converts the possible into the inevitable.Collection: Education
Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?Collection: Death
Nature has not been lavish in her endowments, but each person has his or her own potential in terms of achievement and service. The awareness of that potential is the discovery of purpose; the fulfillment of that potential is the discovery of strength.Collection: Discovery
Do you prefer that you be right or happy?Collection: Happy Birthday
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.Collection: Artist
To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Earth
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.Collection: Moon
The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.Collection: War
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.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
History is an accumulation of error.Collection: Errors
The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Agency
More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.Collection: Warrior
All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.Collection: Brain
The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.Collection: Healing
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.Collection: Communication
It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.Collection: Education
The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.Collection: Purpose
Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.Collection: Essentials
Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.Collection: Enemy
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.Collection: Thinking
The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope.Collection: Motivational Bodybuilding