Quote

Pessimism is a waste of time.

Norman Cousins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Pessimism
Waste
Time

More quotes by Norman Cousins

Image
The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.
Norman Cousins
Image
The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.
Norman Cousins
Image
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.
Norman Cousins
Image
Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
Norman Cousins
Image
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
Image
Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
Norman Cousins
Image
The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.
Norman Cousins
Image
My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
Norman Cousins
Image
The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins
Image
Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?
Norman Cousins
Image
Death is not the enemy living in constant fear of it is.
Norman Cousins
Image
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
Image
The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope
Norman Cousins
Image
Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
Norman Cousins
Image
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.
Norman Cousins
Image
Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life
Norman Cousins
Image
Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.
Norman Cousins
Image
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
Image
More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.
Norman Cousins
Image
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