Norman Cousins Quotes

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

Nobody's perfect, and everybody plays the heel and the baby face at times in real life.

Even great people are always slightly disappointing, which is generally what makes them interesting.

I'm full of contradictions.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

We find the vast majority of people in every country believing that there will be a time when this world will become perfect, when there will be no disease, nor death, nor unhappiness, nor wickedness. That is a very good idea, a very good motive power to inspire and uplift the ignorant. But if we think for a moment, we shall find on the very face of it that it cannot be so. How can it be, seeing that good and evil are the obverse and reverse of the same coin? How can you have good without evil at the same time?

We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.

We are not consistent. We have both these dark sides and some light as well.

In every age and every man there is something to praise as well as to blame.

We're all flawed people at the end of the day; I don't know any perfect people.