Norman Cousins Quotes

There are still so many questions to answer about the workings of the human body and, most mysterious of all, it is influenced by our state of mind.

The mind shapes the body, and the body shapes the mind.

The body has an enormous power of healing, if you really believe you are going to be healed, you're going to be healed. If you really believe you're going to die, you're going to die. If you apply this kind of method to everything, then there is hope.

If you are having the experience of anxiety, your body is making adrenaline and cortisone, if you are having the experience of tranquility, your body starts making valium, if you are having the experience of exhilaration and joy, your body makes interleukins and interferons which are powerful anti-cancer drugs. So, your body is constantly converting your experiences into molecules.

What a doctor or healer tells you is a reflection of the beliefs and expectations you hold. Change your beliefs and you change the prognosis. Who is the doctor? The mind of the patient.

I believe our emotional tension can manifest itself physically.

Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days, you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It's not who we are.

The reality is that what you find out is that your head is the medicine. If your head is not in the right place and you don't think positively, all the medicine technology in the world is not going to work.

The future is to heal back to the mind again. Recognizing that the mind is all powerful - it controls every cell to every degree of its genetic expression.

The genetic you and the neural you aren't alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

Our state of mind affects completely how we treat our bodies.

I had to find the interconnection of my brain together with my physiology.

Our mental state fuels our emotions, and our bodies reflect those emotions.

All medicine is gradations and differences and nuances. And there's such a thing as natural recovery: people spontaneously get better. It happens.

Placebos are like the lollipop of optimism, but we can do much better by dealing directly with the mind... And it works!

A man's body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin's lining; rumple the one, you rumple the other.

Medication is of course important but do not conclude that a pill dissolving in your stomach is necessarily more powerful than a healing thought in your mind.

Reintegrating the brain into the rest of the body is absolutely essential to having the kind of long-term health and substantially lower cost [of care] than if you're going to treat them separately.

What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the disease of his body.

Your body, which is very physical, is under the influence of your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your dreams, your fantasies, your desires, your instincts, your drives, your imagination. All these things orchestrate themselves - all these internal activities that are in the invisible domain that we call consciousness actually have very precise physical effects both in our biology, but they also influence our perception of the world.

If you have the thought in your mind that you are sick, you surely will be.

I admit that thoughts influence the body.

All the physical comes from the mental.

Strength and weakness of mind are misnomers; they are really nothing but the good or bad health of our bodily organs.