Norman Cousins Quotes

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness

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

History is a vast early warning system.

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." Norman Cousins (in his; Anatomy of an Illness)

The control center of your life is your attitude.

Laughter is inner jogging.

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.

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.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. Norman Cousins

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” —Norman Cousins

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

Some people don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

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

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

The tragedy of life is not death it is what we let die inside of us while we live.

When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’”6

One of the ironic things,” Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, “…is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems…. The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another.”8

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.

The way a book is read- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. 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. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475

People living deeply have no fear of dying,” wrote Anaïs Nin. Norman Cousins observed that “the great tragedy of life is not death but what we allow to die inside of us while we live.

I am a single cell in the body of four billion cells. The body is humankind. I am a single cell. My needs are individual but they are not unique. I am interlocked with other human beings in the consequences of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. I will work for human unity and human peace; for a moral order in harmony with the order of the universe. Together we share the quest for a society of the whole equal to our needs, a society in which we need not live beneath our moral capacity, and in which justice has a life of its own. We are single cells in a body of four billion cells. The body is humankind.” --Norman Cousins, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, 1981

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it withing his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.

Progress is possible only when people believe in the possibilities of growth and change. Races or tribes die out not just when they are conquered and suppressed but when they accept their defeated condition, become despairing, and lose their excitement about the future. Norman Cousins Americans

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.

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.

Belief becomes biology.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. NORMAN COUSINS

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. —NORMAN COUSINS

Life is an adventure in forgiveness. — NORMAN COUSINS

THE TRAGEDY OF LIFE IS NOT DEATH, BUT WHAT WE LET DIE INSIDE OF US WHILE WE LIVE. - NORMAN COUSINS

James Potter moved slowly along the narrow aisles of the train, peering as nonchalantly as he could into each compartment. To those inside, he probably looked as if he was searching for someone, some friend or group of confidantes with whom to pass the time during the trip, and this was intentional. The last thing that James wanted anyone to notice was that, despite the bravado he had so recently displayed with his younger brother Albus on the platform, he was nervous. His stomach knotted and churned as if he’d had half a bite of one of Uncles Ron and George’s Puking Pastilles. He opened the folding door at the end of the passenger car and stepped carefully through the passage into the next one. The first compartment was full of girls. They were talking animatedly to one another, already apparently the best of friends despite the fact that, most likely, they had only just met. One of them glanced up and saw him staring. He quickly looked away, pretending to peer out the window behind them, toward the station which still sat bustling with activity. Feeling his cheeks go a little red, he continued down the corridor. If only Rose was a year older she’d be here with him. She was a girl, but she was his cousin and they’d grown up together. It would’ve been nice to have at least one familiar face along with him.

Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one’s self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man’s self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. “All man’s history,” he proclaimed, “is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness.

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions.

Holistic medicine and such books as Norman Cousins’s account of his successful fight against terminal illness and Dr. Bernie Siegel’s descriptions of self-healing are beginning to redress the abstractly materialist view of health that has become so prevalent in this century.

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Afterwards,

Suppose I stopped taking aspirin and phenylbutazone? What about the pain? The bones in my spine and practically every joint in my body felt as though I had been run over by a truck. I knew that pain could be affected by attitudes. Most people become panicky about almost any pain. On all sides they have been so bombarded with advertisements about pain that they take this or that analgesic at the slightest sign of an ache. We are largely illiterate about pain and so are seldom able to deal with it rationally. Pain is part of the body's magic. It is the way the body transmits a sign to the body that something is wrong.

We get what we expect in life, as Norman Cousins pointed out, “The main trouble with despair is that it’s self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can’t scan the horizon for new openings. A burst of energy does not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

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

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Norman Cousins, an American journalist and author, asserts that “the human potential is the most magical but also most elusive fact of life. Men suffer less from hunger or dread than from living under their moral capacity. The atrophy of spirit that most men [and women] know and all men [and women] fear is tied not so much to deprivation or abuse as it is to their inability to make real the best that lies within them. Defeat begins more with a blur in the vision of what is humanly possible than with the appearance of ogres in the path.”11

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

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.

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.

Khrushchev told Norman Cousins, a few months after the crisis, his reaction at the time: When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me137 that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

Its extremely potent active ingredient is an opioid called oxycodone, synthesized from the raw material of opium. The substance was a hot topic among doctors in the Weimar Republic because many physicians quietly took the narcotic themselves. In specialist circles Eukodal was the queen of remedies: a wonder drug. Almost twice as pain-relieving as morphine, which it replaced in popularity, this archetypal designer opioid was characterized by its potential to create very swiftly a euphoric state significantly higher than that of heroin, its pharmacological cousin. Used properly, Eukodal did not make the patient tired or knock him out—quite the contrary.

The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines that we need. Norman Cousins, editor, innovator, professor

Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness and The Healing Heart, divides the human race into “positive” and “negative” people: The positive people work miracles, accounting for the evolution of human performance. I add another division, productive and nonproductive people: those who can do things and those who only talk about things (especially talk about why they can’t do things). As far back as I can remember, I was determined to contribute something, to be productive, and I’ve always questioned those who—though they may know much—go through life without making a mental contribution to the species: “If I live, I ought to speak my mind.” Productive people have a love affair with time, with all of love’s ups and downs. They get more from time than others, seem to know how to use time much better than nonproductive people—so much so that they can waste immense quantities of time and still be enormously creative and productive. One of my favorite examples is John Peabody Harrington, the great anthropologist of the American Southwest. At the time of his death, Harrington’s field notes filled a basement of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and several rented warehouses in the Washington suburbs were needed for the overflow. Yet Carobeth Laird, his wife and Harrington’s biographer, called him one of the greatest wasters of time she’d ever known—and said he felt the same way about himself.

La Gran Tragedia de la vida no es la muerte. La gran tragedia de la vida es lo que dejamos morir en nuestro interior mientras estamos vivos. “Norman Cousins”  

Our bodies are apothecaries. We convert our expectations into chemical reality.” —NORMAN COUSINS, American author, journalist, and professor

Norman Cousins observed that “the great tragedy of life is not death but what we allow to die inside of us while we live.

In his well-known book The Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins described how he overcame one of these autoimmune disorders, ankylosing spondylitis (a form of rheumatoid arthritis), by recognizing that it was emotionally induced and introducing a kind of humor therapy plus vitamin C.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Norman Cousins said, “Death is not the enemy, living in constant fear of it is.

The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live. —Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins once said, “The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live.

Writers help summon people to a vision of human betterment...They create an awareness not just to things as they are, but as they ought to be." ~ 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.

The real tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.

La Gran Tragedia de la vida no es la muerte. La gran tragedia de la vida es lo que dejamos morir en nuestro interior mientras estamos vivos. Norman Cousins.

No wonder the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health made the melancholy observation that a great failure of medical schools is that they pay so little attention to the science of nutrition.

Placebos,” Dr. Shapiro has written in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, “can have profound effects on organic illness, including incurable malignancies.

In extreme form, stress can cause symptoms of conversion hysteria—a malaise described by Jean Charcot, Freud’s teacher.

that a highly developed purpose and the will to live are among the prime raw materials of human existence. I became convinced that these materials may well represent the most potent force within human reach.

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.

As the journalist and writer Norman Cousins said: “Death is not the greatest loss in life, but what dies within us while we live.

Without Christian Science, shamanism, orgone or anything of that sort, the Liberal activist, Norman Cousins, has three times cured himself of major illnesses using the hypothesis that each human contains a healing energy that most of us do not know how to use.

But enough research has been done to indicate that those individuals with determination to overcome an illness tend to have a greater tolerance to severe pain than those who are morbidly apprehensive.

The real tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives. Norman Cousins

ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

Mỗi khi nghĩ đến chuyện này, tôi không khỏi nghĩ đến người lái xe taxi ở Moscow. Tại sao anh ta lại lơ đãng không chịu chạy nhanh hơn? Phải chăng anh ta có vai trò nào đó trong một “chương trình” lớn lao hơn, vì những bực bội mà anh ta gây ra cho Norman Cousins đã dẫn đến việc ông này nghiên cứu và viết sách truyền bá sự hiểu biết của ông về mối liên quan giữa tâm trí và thể xác. Cuốn sách này đã giúp cho biết bao người ý thức về trách nhiệm của họ đối với tình trạng sức khỏe của bản thân...

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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 tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. - Norman Cousins

Living in the second half of the twentieth century, I realized, confers no automatic protection against unwise or even dangerous drugs and methods. Each age has had to undergo its own special nostrums. (Chapter 1)

„Niemand weiß wirklich genug um ein Pessimist zu sein.

you understand the purpose of a personal mission statement. It is the picture of where you want to end up—that is, your destination is the values you want to live your life by. Even if you are off course much or most of the time but still hang on to your sense of hope and your vision, you will eventually arrive at your destination. You will arrive at your destination and usually on time. That’s the whole point—we just get back on course. This idea—this principle—of beginning with the end in mind is based upon the concept that all things are created twice: first in the mind, as a thought or intellectual creation; and second in reality as a physical creation. The mental creation, the flight plan, brings forth the hope in the flight. Norman Cousins taught, “The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It gives human beings a sense of destination and the energy to get started.” At the beginning of this process you will find enormous hope and encouragement as well as fun and happiness in developing a mission statement. It’s truly an enjoyable process. It’s also a leadership process. But here’s something to think about carefully.