Norman Cousins Quotes

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

I don't know... there's something kind of beautiful about it, don't you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?

Life is stronger than death.

When we feel weak, all we have to do is wait a little while. The spring returns and the winter snows melt and fill us with new energy.

I am here today as an example to all that have gone through a personal hell or are going through it right now, whatever that hell might be for you, that you can become whole again. In fact, you can become stronger than you ever thought possible.

I am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate. Someday I must go into that. There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.

Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.

People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.

In the midst of death life persists.

What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.

When you have life, you can weather any storm. You're breathing. You have life.

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

You don't realize what fine fighting material there is in age. ... You show me any one who's lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter - some one who's got the will to live.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

As a tree, even though it has been cut down, is firm so long as its root is safe, and grows again, thus, unless the feeders of thirst are destroyed, the pain (of life) will return again and again.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Surviving means being born over and over.

There was a moth in there, and it still had its wings crumpled up, and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing.