Best 138 quotes of Norman Cousins on MyQuotes

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

Laughter is inner jogging.

Laughter may or may not activate the endorphins or enhance respiration, as some medical researchers contend. What seems clear, however, is that laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic.

Laughter serves as a blocking agent. Like a bullet-proof vest, it may help protect you against the ravages of negative emotions that can assault you in disease.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

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

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

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

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.

Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.

Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

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.

No one really knows enough to be a pessimist.

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

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life.

Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.

On the quality of life: #1. Realize that each human being has a built-in capacity for recuperation and repair. #2. Recognize that the quality of life is all-important. #3. Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life. #4. Nurture the regenerative and restorative forces within you. #5. Utilize laughter to create a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work for yourself and those around you. #6. Develop confidence and ability to feel love, hope and faith, and acquire a strong will to live.

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

Pain is part of the body's magic. It is the way the body transmits a sign to the brain that something is wrong.

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

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.

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.

Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations- plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.

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

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.

The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment.

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 capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.

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

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.

The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.

The essence of man is imperfection.

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

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.

The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.

The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth.

The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope

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.

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.

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.

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 one 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.

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.

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.

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

The need is to recognize that The patient is the healer, Not the doctor.

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