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.

Cousins frames hope not as a passive feeling but as a practical human capacity that organizes life toward a future. Calling it “the most significant fact” suggests hope is foundational—more basic than circumstance—because it gives people a sense of direction (“destination”) and the initial momentum (“energy to get started”) needed to act. The quote implies that agency begins psychologically: when people can imagine a meaningful endpoint, they can mobilize effort, endure setbacks, and initiate change. In this view, hope functions like a bridge between aspiration and action, turning uncertainty into purposeful movement.