Norman Cousins Quotes

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

I see a world in the future in which we understand that all life is related to us and we treat that life with great humility and respect.

We emerged out of nature, and when we die, we return to nature. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that we will never understand or control. We need to have sacred places where we go with respect, not just looking for resources or opportunity.

By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

The study of Nature is intercourse with the Highest Mind. You should never trifle with Nature.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.

The way my parents brought me up to see the world is still absolutely key to what I am about. The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me.

Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of 'escape of energy,' that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God's creation, made in his own image, destined to live for ever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone else's Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.

Reverence is a perception of the soul. Reverence is a natural aspect of authentic empowerment because the soul reveres all of Life. When the personality is aligned with the soul, it cannot perceive life except with reverence. Approaching life with reverence is a step toward moving the personality into alignment with the soul because it brings an aspect of the soul directly into the physical environment.

Every form of life is sacred. It is not possible to have an activity that is not sacred...Coming to see everything as sacred and honouring everything is spiritual development.

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

I would like to say, historically, from the very beginning, our people have time and again expressed the need for people to live in harmony with the creator, the mother earth, fellow man, and respect our brother's vision. In the past and the present, we have been respon-sible for the greatest gains; cultivated foods and medicines; democratic government, and many other areas of concern.

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives.