NORMAN COUSINS

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

A 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.

He who keeps his cool best wins.

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.

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

Laughter is inner jogging.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

History is a vast early warning system.

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.

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.

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.

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

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

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.

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

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.