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 CousinsWhy are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
Norman CousinsAll this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
Norman CousinsIf the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it.
Norman CousinsHope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.
Norman CousinsAt a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"
Norman CousinsBut we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all. In the spirit of this passage, the editor has taken the liberty of editing Mr. Cousins' language to make it more gender inclusive.
Norman CousinsMan is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
Norman CousinsHumanity today is not safe in the presence of humanity. The old cannibalism has given way to anonymous action in which the killer and the killed do not know each other, and in which,indeed, the very fact of mass death has the effect of making mass killing less reprehensible than the death of a single individual. In short, we have evolved in every respect except our ability to protect ourselves against human intelligence. Our knowledge is vast but does not embrace the workings of peace.
Norman CousinsNothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
Norman CousinsWe are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.
Norman CousinsI cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.
Norman CousinsThe sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.
Norman CousinsThe 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 CousinsThe 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.
Norman CousinsThe 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.
Norman CousinsLaughter 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 CousinsThe purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us
Norman CousinsTo talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.
Norman CousinsWhat a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.
Norman CousinsEducation tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity.
Norman CousinsMore and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.
Norman CousinsThe physician knows that his little black bag can carry him only so far and that the body's own healing system is the main resource.
Norman CousinsWe have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.
Norman CousinsDeath 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 CousinsFortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of inter-relationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival.
Norman CousinsThe physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.
Norman CousinsA human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.
Norman Cousins