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Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
Norman Cousins
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Norman Cousins
Age: 75 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 30
Journalist
Literary Critic
Peace Activist
Professor
Writer
Union City
New Jersey
Trying
Verdict
Defy
Diagnosis
Wisdom
More quotes by Norman Cousins
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
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.
Norman Cousins
Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.
Norman Cousins
It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.
Norman Cousins
Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
Norman Cousins
Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.
Norman Cousins
To be able to rise from the earth to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe
Norman Cousins
The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.
Norman Cousins
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.
Norman Cousins
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.
Norman Cousins
The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us
Norman Cousins
In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
Norman Cousins
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.
Norman Cousins
Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
Norman Cousins
The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.
Norman Cousins
Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
Norman Cousins
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
Norman Cousins
Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
Norman Cousins
Cynicism is intellectual treason.
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