199 Quotes by Norman Cousins

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

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

Education fails unless the Three R’s at one end of the school spectrum lead ultimately to the Four P’s at the other-Preparati on for Earning, Preparation for Living, Preparation for Understanding, Preparation for Participation in the problems involved in the making of a better world.

The physician’s ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body’s own healing system.

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice – a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation’s liberties.

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.

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

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