Steve Wambsganss

“Suppose I stopped taking aspirin and phenylbutazone? What about the pain? The bones in my spine and practically every joint in my body felt as though I had been run over by a truck.
I knew that pain could be affected by attitudes. Most people become panicky about almost any pain. On all sides they have been so bombarded with advertisements about pain that they take this or that analgesic at the slightest sign of an ache. We are largely illiterate about pain and so are seldom able to deal with it rationally. Pain is part of the body's magic. It is the way the body transmits a sign to the body that something is wrong.”
― Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient

“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.”
― Norman Cousins

“The tragedy of life is not death it is what we let die inside of us while we live.”
― Norman Cousins

“I am a single cell in the body of four billion cells. The body is humankind. I am a single cell. My needs are individual but they are not unique. I am interlocked with other human beings in the consequences of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. I will work for human unity and human peace; for a moral order in harmony with the order of the universe. Together we share the quest for a society of the whole equal to our needs, a society in which we need not live beneath our moral capacity, and in which justice has a life of its own. We are single cells in a body of four billion cells. The body is humankind.” --Norman Cousins, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, 1981”
― Norman Cousins