Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Mason Cooley, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Mason Cooley quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 1338 Mason Cooley quotes for you to read and share.
In youth, love and art. In age, investments and antiques. -- Mason Cooley
Cruel impulses stir all about my kindly heart. -- Mason Cooley
Nothing is more cheerful than talking about our friends' shortcomings. -- Mason Cooley
Lack of reciprocity ruins friendships, but makes love affairs exciting for a time. -- Mason Cooley
Masturbation is a democratic pleasure, practiced by rich and poor, young and old, married and single. -- Mason Cooley
Like a frog, the aphorist waits for something to fly by that he can catch with his tongue. -- Mason Cooley
A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming. -- Mason Cooley
If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world. -- Mason Cooley
Intuition is often mistaken, but not altogether. -- Mason Cooley
In bridge clubs and in councils of state, the passions are the same. -- Mason Cooley
Love sorrows are addictive as other sorrows are not. -- Mason Cooley
Avid readers are enchanted by meaning, which is available chiefly in books. -- Mason Cooley
Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy. -- Mason Cooley
The great advantage of a new friend is that we have not yet found one another out. -- Mason Cooley
A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places. -- Mason Cooley
The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty. -- Mason Cooley
Gossip is dying out because fewer and fewer people care to talk about anything besides themselves. -- Mason Cooley
The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies. -- Mason Cooley
Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another. -- Mason Cooley
If a problem is insoluble, it is Necessity. Leave it alone. -- Mason Cooley
The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd. -- Mason Cooley
I deplore my shortcomings, but plan to keep them. -- Mason Cooley
F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that prolonging his adolescence would protect his talent. -- Mason Cooley
Human nature is a scoundrel's favorite explanation. -- Mason Cooley
The passion for money is never fickle. -- Mason Cooley
History goes out of control almost as often as nature does. -- Mason Cooley
Lovers' quarrels are not generally about money. Divorce cases generally are. -- Mason Cooley
When I prayed for success, I forgot to ask for sound sleep and good digestion. -- Mason Cooley
I cling to depression, thinking it a form of truth. -- Mason Cooley
We may eat dinner together, but everyone puts the food in his own mouth. -- Mason Cooley
The pleasantest part of work is having done it. -- Mason Cooley
The prison is the state writ small. -- Mason Cooley
Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions. -- Mason Cooley
Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life. -- Mason Cooley
Snarls and sobs show that a love affair is getting serious. -- Mason Cooley
Home again, I can groan, scratch, and talk to myself. -- Mason Cooley
Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love. -- Mason Cooley
Show enough regret, and your refusal will inspire gratitude. -- Mason Cooley
Self-analysis always cheats. -- Mason Cooley
The madness of love can always be suspended
to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance. -- Mason Cooley
Cynicism has its own zealots. -- Mason Cooley
I feel that I have something significant to say, but I cannot think what it is. -- Mason Cooley
Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own. -- Mason Cooley
I may forget my dignity, but you may not. -- Mason Cooley
Spontaneity comes after skill, not before. -- Mason Cooley
People who expect deference resent mere civility. -- Mason Cooley
Faith moves mountains, but you have to keep pushing while you are praying. -- Mason Cooley
When you feel protective toward your parents, you have become an adult. -- Mason Cooley
Dignity takes alarm at the unexpected sound of laughter. -- Mason Cooley
An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie. -- Mason Cooley
Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking. -- Mason Cooley
Opportunity knocks, but doesn't always answer to its name. -- Mason Cooley
Our punning minds rejoin what logic has separated. -- Mason Cooley
Every work of art changes its predecessors. -- Mason Cooley
A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude. -- Mason Cooley
Those who follow where their genitals lead them often wind up in tedious company. -- Mason Cooley
I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument. -- Mason Cooley
The more knowledge, the clearer what the doubts are. -- Mason Cooley
The realism of failure, the romance of success. -- Mason Cooley
To be a social success, do not act pathetic, arrogant, or bored. Do not discuss your unhappy childhood, your visit to the dentist,the shortcomings of your cleaning woman, the state of your bowels, or your spouse's bad habits. You will be thought a paragon (or perhaps a monster) of good behavior. -- Mason Cooley
To avoid taking responsibility, I become unresponsive but hang on until the other person leaves me. -- Mason Cooley
The children of childish parents age quickly. -- Mason Cooley
One's fetishes are fascinating, but not because of their beauty or significance. The same could be said for one's genitals, or one's children. -- Mason Cooley
The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth. -- Mason Cooley
Lies save trouble now, but may return in thunder and lightning. -- Mason Cooley
Most people see no reason to stop arguing just because an issue has been decided. -- Mason Cooley
Old age likes indecency. It's a sign of life. -- Mason Cooley
Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams. -- Mason Cooley
Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word. -- Mason Cooley
When love and adventure are finished, it's nice to have getting and spending to fall back on. -- Mason Cooley
Art can make chaos seductive. -- Mason Cooley
A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings. -- Mason Cooley
People may show jealousy, but hide their envy. -- Mason Cooley
Make the expectations lively enough, and action will follow. -- Mason Cooley
Small faults and virtues are for daily life. The big ones are for emergencies. -- Mason Cooley
Envy awakens at the sound of a distant laugh. -- Mason Cooley
In conversation, everyone sits in confident judgment on the world. -- Mason Cooley
Once discover comfort, and there is no turning back. -- Mason Cooley
The cues that arouse desire are changed by Fashion, but feel like the proddings of Nature. -- Mason Cooley
Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing. -- Mason Cooley
Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered. -- Mason Cooley
Fame now wears the halo that once crowned holiness. -- Mason Cooley
Many have never felt strong, but everyone knows what it is to feel weak. -- Mason Cooley
Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera. -- Mason Cooley
Lovers never want to say "I love you" at the same moment. Hence all the love stories. -- Mason Cooley
Working cuts down on both folly and wisdom. -- Mason Cooley
After a moment of shrinking back, we domesticate the grotesque. -- Mason Cooley
The lover as baby is a less troubling idea than the baby as lover. -- Mason Cooley
Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists. -- Mason Cooley
The past is always waiting to entangle and deflect us. -- Mason Cooley
At the dinner table, if you can't think of anything to say, sit quietly. Don't throw rolls, or chew on your napkin. -- Mason Cooley
Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent. -- Mason Cooley
Some crave grief like strong drink. -- Mason Cooley
Nothing easier than to confuse busyness with goodness. -- Mason Cooley
Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts. -- Mason Cooley
A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet. -- Mason Cooley
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's. -- Mason Cooley
The egg is the symbol of perfection. Do you want an egg? -- Mason Cooley
The popping of bubblegum discourages the most determined lecher. -- Mason Cooley
I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals. -- Mason Cooley
In love, self-love is always at risk. -- Mason Cooley
Aphorisms have never seduced anybody, but they have fooled some into considering themselves worldly-wise. -- Mason Cooley
Not romance but companionship makes the happiness of daily life. -- Mason Cooley
The modest youth somehow knows just what to do for the cameras. -- Mason Cooley
In an aphorism, aptness counts for more than truth. -- Mason Cooley
Young men preen. Old men scheme. -- Mason Cooley
I seldom remember my father, but I sneeze and rub my nose the way he did. I also love my son with grief and anger, as he did. -- Mason Cooley
If I want my time wasted, I'll waste it myself. -- Mason Cooley
The suburbs: signs of life, but no proofs. -- Mason Cooley
Life is the risk we cannot refuse. -- Mason Cooley
The writer is always courted by invitations from the all-too- familiar. -- Mason Cooley
If "there is no harm in asking," why guilt and fear when we do so? -- Mason Cooley
The educated can listen impassively to almost anything. -- Mason Cooley
Mild brown eyes beckon me to the past, but memory provides no clue. -- Mason Cooley
The lion cares less about being king of the beasts than about finding his dinner. -- Mason Cooley
I reject all evidence that my fabulous beloved is an ordinary person who worries, watches TV, and has bouts of indigestion. -- Mason Cooley
Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries. -- Mason Cooley
Weakness is a better teacher than strength. Weakness must learn to understand the obstacles that strength brushes aside. -- Mason Cooley
In the city, nudity means something; in the wild, it just exists. -- Mason Cooley
All the powers of imagination combine in hypochondria. -- Mason Cooley
Oblivion waits without beckoning or threatening. -- Mason Cooley
A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time. -- Mason Cooley
The past goes right on pulling me apart, though I can scarcely remember the people or the issues. -- Mason Cooley
In the labyrinth of a difficult text, we find unmarked forks in the path, detours, blind alleys, loops that deliver us back to our point of entry, and finally the monster who whispers an unintelligible truth in our ears. -- Mason Cooley
Complaining is the favorite pastime of millions. -- Mason Cooley
Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves. -- Mason Cooley
To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point. -- Mason Cooley
I dream of vague shapes that hint of my heart's desire. -- Mason Cooley
The only peace is being out of earshot. -- Mason Cooley
As a comforter, philosophy cannot compete with a good dinner. -- Mason Cooley
Fastidious taste makes enjoyment a struggle. -- Mason Cooley
As a youth, I sought out decadence; as an elder, I try to avoid decay. -- Mason Cooley
Procrastination and impatience form a system of checks and balances. -- Mason Cooley
When love ends, the beloved is no longer standing on a pedestal, but in a hole. -- Mason Cooley
Children now expect their parents to audition for approval. -- Mason Cooley
The poor live slow and hard; the rich, fast and easy. The rest of us shuffle along as we may. -- Mason Cooley
The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning. -- Mason Cooley
Our detachments move us toward freedom and death. -- Mason Cooley
Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes. -- Mason Cooley
Narcissus weeps to find that his Image does not return his love. -- Mason Cooley
My strengths make me contemptuous. My weaknesses make me charitable. -- Mason Cooley
Yawns are hard to refute. -- Mason Cooley
The familiar changes as we cling to it. -- Mason Cooley
Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations. -- Mason Cooley
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means. -- Mason Cooley
Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others, but only widen it. -- Mason Cooley
Without the blessing of cowardice, the world would long since have been torn to bits. -- Mason Cooley
Good advice is never as helpful as an interest-free loan. -- Mason Cooley
The self-righteous feel no need to be charming, and thus double their offensiveness. -- Mason Cooley
Complainers rule out happiness, mentioning it only as something lost. -- Mason Cooley
The lazy manage to keep up with the earth's rotation just as well as the industrious. -- Mason Cooley
Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer. -- Mason Cooley
Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here? -- Mason Cooley
Not even self-love can always be counted on for support. -- Mason Cooley
My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived. -- Mason Cooley
The novelty we want is always close to the familiar. -- Mason Cooley
Alone, I am drunk on my thoughts; in company, I am sober again. -- Mason Cooley
Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble. -- Mason Cooley
The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit. -- Mason Cooley
Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around. -- Mason Cooley
Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorism sometimes casts off cynicism and expresses strong feeling. -- Mason Cooley
An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence. -- Mason Cooley
Your flattery is as full of contempt as your insults were. -- Mason Cooley
Expenditure now attracts fame as conquest once did. -- Mason Cooley
The limitations of pleasure cannot be overcome by more pleasure. -- Mason Cooley
Travelling, I worry about luggage, prices, and strange food. At home, I am free to broaden my mind by thinking about the higher things. -- Mason Cooley
Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are. -- Mason Cooley
Loving, not the beloved, is the joy of love. The beloved, knowing this, most resolutely declines to be grateful. -- Mason Cooley
Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids. -- Mason Cooley
Few artists can afford artistic temperament. -- Mason Cooley
Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind. -- Mason Cooley
As soon as I hear of a right, I want it. -- Mason Cooley
The etiquette of romantic love is as elaborate as that surrounding the Emperor of China. -- Mason Cooley
When I am bored with myself, I try to find someone to listen to me. -- Mason Cooley
My love grows wide and shallow in an effort to spread my losses. -- Mason Cooley
To win hearts, smile kindly on people's weaknesses. -- Mason Cooley
The beginning sets the rules. -- Mason Cooley
'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.' -- Mason Cooley
I pursue pleasure, but stingily, suspiciously. -- Mason Cooley
The same old thing
even if it's champagne
is still the same old thing. -- Mason Cooley
Without a little negligence, life would be intolerable. -- Mason Cooley
Whether I give to a beggar or not, his existence puts me in the wrong. -- Mason Cooley
Every representation, even of an orgy, is a sublimation. -- Mason Cooley
A sense of absurdity interferes with my efforts to appear venerable. -- Mason Cooley
The smile of a politician is strong and friendly, but noncommittal. -- Mason Cooley
The wretchedness of failure is the great attraction of success. -- Mason Cooley
Health foods make promises that only the Second Coming could fulfill. -- Mason Cooley
Love Songs Now: Fewer broken hearts, more sexual misery. -- Mason Cooley
People often imagine that being hard to please confers a certain superiority. -- Mason Cooley
Cats are inquisitive, but hate to admit it. -- Mason Cooley
After sixty, the self-questioning of middle age is obsolete. -- Mason Cooley
Good places for aphorisms: in fortune cookies, on bumper stickers, and on banners flying over the Palace of Free Advice. -- Mason Cooley
To love a fool is a misfortune, but does not make one a fool. -- Mason Cooley
Anyone who feels like a fool has made a good beginning. -- Mason Cooley
Shaw writes as if it were always midday. -- Mason Cooley
Only the strong and the hopeful are able to revolt. -- Mason Cooley
The beloved is the ultimate fetish. -- Mason Cooley
The noisy vacancy of youth, the quiet vacancy of age. -- Mason Cooley
At retirement, switching from "I must" to "I want" leaves me puzzled and uneasy. -- Mason Cooley
Rage against the world, if you like, but quietly, or the Guardians will awake. -- Mason Cooley
Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences. -- Mason Cooley
Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge. -- Mason Cooley
Cheerfulness is a policy; happiness is a talent. -- Mason Cooley
Prudence suspects that happiness is a bait set by risk. -- Mason Cooley
The powerless worship Luck and Fate. -- Mason Cooley
Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit. -- Mason Cooley
Creativity is not a substitute for competence. -- Mason Cooley
Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it. -- Mason Cooley
Malice is always authentic and sincere. -- Mason Cooley
If you do not throw in a few promises of better things to come, gloomy one, I am going to take you back to the library. -- Mason Cooley
The vices of youth now exceed my powers, but not my fancy. -- Mason Cooley
Clouds of flavors and savors float around the thing-in-itself. -- Mason Cooley
Reason argues the case, but fact may determine the judgment. -- Mason Cooley
Either offer me something I really like, or stop trying to tempt me. -- Mason Cooley
A blunt statement can be as false as any other. -- Mason Cooley
Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself. -- Mason Cooley
I have a special grudge against those who have the same faults as I do. -- Mason Cooley
Violence stops thought. Hence its popularity as a pain-killer. -- Mason Cooley
Everything changes as it is written down. -- Mason Cooley
Disobedient parents are a great trouble to their children. -- Mason Cooley
One who can find lemons sweet and grapes sour is ready for Dame Fortune. -- Mason Cooley
Great men wait for the right moment to abandon caution. The rest of us abandon it when impatience becomes too much for us. -- Mason Cooley
Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe. -- Mason Cooley
The negative always wins at last, but I like it none the better for that. -- Mason Cooley
Adversity can strengthen us if it does not go on too long. -- Mason Cooley
Listening to people keeps them entertained. -- Mason Cooley
The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point. -- Mason Cooley
Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion ... -- Mason Cooley
As every cockroach knows, thriving on poisons is the secret of success. -- Mason Cooley
Always assume that a lucky hit will not be repeated. -- Mason Cooley
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference. -- Mason Cooley
If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. -- Mason Cooley
In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be. -- Mason Cooley
The Simple Life is not a simple life. -- Mason Cooley
Ladies and gentlemen are supposed to be looked after by others, like children and pets. -- Mason Cooley
Money: power at its most liquid. -- Mason Cooley
I feel disappointed, but I don't remember just what I expected. -- Mason Cooley
My obsessions used to be my protectors, but now they have taken me prisoner. -- Mason Cooley
No use saying necessity is making a mistake. -- Mason Cooley
Sacred or not, sacrifice is an ugly business. -- Mason Cooley
I would like to be a figment of my own imagination, but belly and bowels will not permit. -- Mason Cooley
If we knew enough, fortune would turn out to be nature. -- Mason Cooley
Money is to my social existence what health is to my body. -- Mason Cooley
I am invigorated by work, wasted by pleasure. -- Mason Cooley
Now that I see you understand me so well, I will avoid you. -- Mason Cooley
Paradox likes contradictions with exits. -- Mason Cooley
The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion. -- Mason Cooley
Inconsistency has been overpraised by people who do not expect to suffer from it. -- Mason Cooley
Politicians love change, but of details only. -- Mason Cooley
Joy goes as deep as sorrow, but leaves less of itself behind. -- Mason Cooley
The greater the privilege, the more hidden the arrogance. The Emperor of China need not exist. -- Mason Cooley
Birth dates and bathroom scales tell more truth than I want to know. -- Mason Cooley
Addicts turn their pleasures into vengeful Gods. -- Mason Cooley
Sometimes I discover I have changed my mind because I have forgotten what I used to think. -- Mason Cooley
Profusion gives pleasure up to a point; then we become squeamish. -- Mason Cooley
Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence. -- Mason Cooley
Pessimists fear becoming the dupes of Hope. Optimists enjoy Hope's company, and consider being duped no great matter. -- Mason Cooley
I win on my merits; my opponents win by cheating. -- Mason Cooley
Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations. -- Mason Cooley
I keep eating for fear I will be hungry. -- Mason Cooley
When a paradox is widely believed, it is no longer recognized as a paradox. -- Mason Cooley
Fortuna smiles and frowns according to a timetable surprising even to herself. -- Mason Cooley
I would be glad to worship success if I could find her. -- Mason Cooley
Being charming takes time and effort, and I am busy. -- Mason Cooley
Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth. -- Mason Cooley
Disappointment proves that expectations were mistaken. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorism wants to be at the same time both main line and off beat. -- Mason Cooley
Women encourage men to be childish, then scold them. -- Mason Cooley
Moderation shifts when extremes do. -- Mason Cooley
I am often attracted to people with whom I could not hold a five minute conversation. -- Mason Cooley
Do not wait for a reason to be happy. -- Mason Cooley
Theory can leave questions unanswered, but practice has to come up with something. -- Mason Cooley
At sixty, I would like to give my future back its vistas of uncertainty. -- Mason Cooley
Everyone values the good nature of a man with a gun. -- Mason Cooley
If you should ever acknowledge my existence, I plan to snub you. -- Mason Cooley
After rejection - misery, then thoughts of revenge, and finally, oh well, another try elsewhere. -- Mason Cooley
Keep your lies short and simple. -- Mason Cooley
The more powerless people are, the longer they are kept waiting. -- Mason Cooley
The Ancient Mariner seizes the guest at the wedding feast and will not let go until he has told all his story: the prototype of the bore. -- Mason Cooley
Amateurs believe their enthusiasm will suffice. -- Mason Cooley
An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom strives to detach, but finds itself stuck. -- Mason Cooley
Drunks conjure an endless drama from their bottles. -- Mason Cooley
Innovation violates tradition
attacks it in public and steals from it in private. -- Mason Cooley
Love begins with an image; lust with a sensation. -- Mason Cooley
An old man drinks tea and reads the newspaper
forgetting age for a moment. -- Mason Cooley
Getting ready: the show girl scratches her breast and shakes out her feathers. -- Mason Cooley
The Media: bold sex and violence, timid politics and morals. -- Mason Cooley
Clothes make the body both mysterious and historical. -- Mason Cooley
Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief. -- Mason Cooley
Simplicity is a strict taskmaster. -- Mason Cooley
The young break rules for fun. The old for profit. -- Mason Cooley
When love ends, we cry out against destiny. When friendship ends, we cry out against our friend. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom, not the will, is the mother of change. Necessity is the father. -- Mason Cooley
When I try to portray to myself my heart's desire, nothing happens. -- Mason Cooley
The present necessarily betrays the past. -- Mason Cooley
Death is always there, just beneath the surface. -- Mason Cooley
We often disguise our reflexes as deliberate actions. -- Mason Cooley
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. -- Mason Cooley
Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating. -- Mason Cooley
My noisy denunciation trails off in doubt. -- Mason Cooley
In love as in art, good technique helps. -- Mason Cooley
Truth usually stammers at first. -- Mason Cooley
After I have said what is required by my vanity and my morality, I may find a moment for Truth. -- Mason Cooley
Since we hate the same people, we should be friends. -- Mason Cooley
Reclusive? The inner city will secure your privacy better than any desert cave. -- Mason Cooley
Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted. -- Mason Cooley
No chaos, no creation. Evidence: the kitchen at mealtime. -- Mason Cooley
Many think that assigning blame settles matters. -- Mason Cooley
Intelligence in isolation turns to aimless marauding. -- Mason Cooley
Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs. -- Mason Cooley
Power makes gods. Virtue makes martyrs. -- Mason Cooley
Wealth makes the laws that poverty must obey. -- Mason Cooley
Sexual attraction pairs people, but does not match them. -- Mason Cooley
The rich are happier than we are, and should be. -- Mason Cooley
Art seduces, but does not exploit. -- Mason Cooley
In the present age, a man with harmonious ideas is regarded as out of touch. -- Mason Cooley
Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening. -- Mason Cooley
An illicit love affair seems sweetly old-fashioned in the age of one night stands and orgies. -- Mason Cooley
Pornography does not inspire violence, but you can break a leg trying to imitate it. -- Mason Cooley
Glamour looks eloquent but seldom talks. -- Mason Cooley
An insult angers me. Being ignored crushes me. -- Mason Cooley
Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty-the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc. -- Mason Cooley
Fame is fickle, but Obscurity is usually faithful to the end. -- Mason Cooley
Even the most fickle are faithful to a few bad habits. -- Mason Cooley
Every declaration of love contains an unstated list of exceptions and demands. -- Mason Cooley
No need to be sentimental to mourn the loss of Paradise. -- Mason Cooley
Self-inflicted misery smirks under its crown of thorns. -- Mason Cooley
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen: even less, the trouble I've successfully avoided. -- Mason Cooley
If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves. -- Mason Cooley
General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others. -- Mason Cooley
Most of my decisions in life seem absent-minded but inevitable. -- Mason Cooley
Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics. -- Mason Cooley
Prudence does not make people happy; it merely deprives them of the excitement of being constantly in trouble. -- Mason Cooley
Insecurity is not just a state of mind. -- Mason Cooley
Manly men and womanly women are still here but feeling nervous. -- Mason Cooley
A moment of eloquence enthralls us. An hour's worth leaves us stupefied. -- Mason Cooley
Sometimes I dread loneliness more than bores. Other times, the reverse. -- Mason Cooley
Faith of the bore: everything is worth saying. -- Mason Cooley
To gain a reputation for virtue, grieve over those you injure. -- Mason Cooley
Moo may represent an idea, but only the cow knows. -- Mason Cooley
Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery. -- Mason Cooley
Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them. -- Mason Cooley
Methodology is applied ideology. -- Mason Cooley
A fastidious taste is best indoors, away from nature and the city. -- Mason Cooley
An ardent lover often makes a cold friend. -- Mason Cooley
You know you're in love when you stop comparing. -- Mason Cooley
I am open-minded on all questions I care nothing about. -- Mason Cooley
My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet. -- Mason Cooley
Like love, destruction can be ecstatic. -- Mason Cooley
The telephone gives us the happiness of being together yet safely apart. -- Mason Cooley
You are as happy as you think you are, but not necessarily as miserable as you imagine. -- Mason Cooley
Health can be squandered, but not stored up. -- Mason Cooley
An event is not over until everyone is tired of talking about it. -- Mason Cooley
For some, bottles of liquor gleam like the towers of Eldorado. -- Mason Cooley
I criticize myself ruthlessly, but never mention the faults of which I am truly ashamed. -- Mason Cooley
I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written. -- Mason Cooley
Eagerness to please attracts bullies and bores. -- Mason Cooley
I have forgiven you. Nevertheless, begone! -- Mason Cooley
Mistakes are the only universal form of originality. -- Mason Cooley
Work at first rescues us, then ravages us. -- Mason Cooley
The Lady: a fluty voice, sensible shoes, a melancholy sense of living by rules few still remember. -- Mason Cooley
Victimization has its privileges, and I want some. -- Mason Cooley
Futility has become a great subject, full of opportunities. -- Mason Cooley
Self-esteem is not based on itself. -- Mason Cooley
Comedy is hostile to profundity, and brings everything to the surface. -- Mason Cooley
Eccentricity: strength of character doubling back on itself. -- Mason Cooley
Everyone fears and courts his own demon. -- Mason Cooley
Rules that are never violated cease to be recognized as Rules. -- Mason Cooley
Lovers always believe one another's sleight-of-hand tricks. -- Mason Cooley
When a modest man praises himself, people listen. -- Mason Cooley
Drunks do not have friends, but accomplices. -- Mason Cooley
Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong. -- Mason Cooley
Every few years something new breaks into the circle of my thoughts. -- Mason Cooley
Masks are what they seem to be; not so the faces beneath them. -- Mason Cooley
Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality. -- Mason Cooley
God has replaced sex as the unmentionable. -- Mason Cooley
I was once in love with books. Now they go their way and I go mine. -- Mason Cooley
Facts do not give advice. -- Mason Cooley
Reason cannot break out of its own loop. -- Mason Cooley
To make a thought my own, I must think it often. -- Mason Cooley
Heroes are born to be troublemakers. -- Mason Cooley
The tranquility of my room partakes too much of Forest Lawn. -- Mason Cooley
Contempt for others, like masturbation, is best as a secret pleasure. -- Mason Cooley
Never ask a bore a question. -- Mason Cooley
Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating. -- Mason Cooley
As I criss-cross the city hurrying, I feel always the unchanging cold beneath the pavement. -- Mason Cooley
Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money. -- Mason Cooley
Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it. -- Mason Cooley
In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything. -- Mason Cooley
Street sign: Ho Hum Road & Easy Street In retirement, I look for days off from my days off. -- Mason Cooley
Change often makes accepted customs into crimes. -- Mason Cooley
Every life has a love story, even though the beloved may be imaginary, or a cat. -- Mason Cooley
The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less. -- Mason Cooley
Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs. -- Mason Cooley
Families in which nothing is ever discussed usually have a lot not to discuss. -- Mason Cooley
Eccentricity gives misfits a way of fitting in. -- Mason Cooley
Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends. -- Mason Cooley
Sorrow also fulfills Desire. Example: the Soaps. -- Mason Cooley
Aimless drifting also fulfills an intention. -- Mason Cooley
I am kept in bondage by the moles of my beloved. -- Mason Cooley
Sloth, not ill-will, makes me unjust. -- Mason Cooley
It is not confused. We are. -- Mason Cooley
I resist change even as I call for it. -- Mason Cooley
Reversing a proposition rearranges its terms, but still keeps out new terms. -- Mason Cooley
The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien. -- Mason Cooley
A yawn is more disconcerting than a contradiction. -- Mason Cooley
In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing. -- Mason Cooley
Freedom is the moment between sleep and waking before selfhood and the world return. -- Mason Cooley
Alone, I am satisfied with myself. With others, I am beset by troubling comparisons. -- Mason Cooley
With age, I have become both more pious and more shameless. -- Mason Cooley
Shameless: Punish me for my desire if you will. It burns still. -- Mason Cooley
Early every morning an old woman goes to the market to curse a grocery clerk, who curses back. -- Mason Cooley
Nonsense is socially OK, but not stupidity. -- Mason Cooley
Don Juan tries not to see the skeptical winks that greet his boasting. -- Mason Cooley
Altruism is for those who cannot endure their desires. -- Mason Cooley
Posterity
the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism
grows ever harder to conceive. -- Mason Cooley
Vulgarity is innocent; urbanity is not. -- Mason Cooley
Scholars dream of finding small facts pregnant with great progeny. -- Mason Cooley
My taking a seat on the Council of the Fathers caused a desperate fluttering among my ghosts. -- Mason Cooley
People are reluctant to cite boredom as grounds for divorce. -- Mason Cooley
My nostalgia is for the impossible. -- Mason Cooley
You are so tactful that I have no idea what you want. -- Mason Cooley
Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty. -- Mason Cooley
My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic. -- Mason Cooley
The young are just as opinionated as the old, but have more exciting things to do than sit around airing their opinions all day. -- Mason Cooley
Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets. -- Mason Cooley
The power of lying is much less than the power of what is not to be discussed. -- Mason Cooley
Our vices are attempts to combine self-medication and enjoyment. -- Mason Cooley
I am now old enough to make common cause with my predecessors against my successors. -- Mason Cooley
When you can't figure out what to do, it's time for a nap. -- Mason Cooley
Tolerance is a placid contempt. -- Mason Cooley
Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris. -- Mason Cooley
I love you is the inscription on Pandora's box. -- Mason Cooley
Adrenalin dispels boredom. Run, you sufferers from ennui! Run for your lives! -- Mason Cooley
Beware of wallflowers. They expect to have everything done for them. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom knows when to return death's embrace. -- Mason Cooley
Art chooses its constraints. -- Mason Cooley
Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy. -- Mason Cooley
Sincerity guarantees nothing but itself. -- Mason Cooley
Pleasure usually comes when called, but not happiness. -- Mason Cooley
Sentimentality is the respect the cold-hearted pay to feeling. -- Mason Cooley
The Muses inspire art and pretend not to notice when Mammon buys it. -- Mason Cooley
Self-pity dries up our sympathy for others. -- Mason Cooley
Many have attempted unnatural acts, but Nature has always shown the way. -- Mason Cooley
Originality is in the eye of the beholder. -- Mason Cooley
Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm. -- Mason Cooley
Laughing at our friends, we avenge the disappointment they have caused. -- Mason Cooley
The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it. -- Mason Cooley
Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden. -- Mason Cooley
Arrogance rides triumphantly through the gates, barely glancing at the old woman about to cut the rope and spring shut the trap. -- Mason Cooley
Regret for wasted time is more wasted time -- Mason Cooley
Laughter and tears may not persuade, but they cannot be refuted. -- Mason Cooley
Indifference is an excellent substitute for patience. -- Mason Cooley
Travelers never think that they are the foreigners. -- Mason Cooley
I keep renaming my motives, but continue doing the same things. -- Mason Cooley
Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes. -- Mason Cooley
Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content. -- Mason Cooley
The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend. -- Mason Cooley
Sleaze is a point by point refutation of elegance. -- Mason Cooley
Attacking a belief can be the first step toward embracing it. -- Mason Cooley
My mother's mild-eyed sadness looks at me from the eyes of those I love. -- Mason Cooley
In describing someone's character, I reveal my own. -- Mason Cooley
My mind is led astray by every faint rustle. -- Mason Cooley
Opportunity often goes begging. Luck, never. -- Mason Cooley
Magic lives in curves, not angles. -- Mason Cooley
If I can't serve as a role model, let me serve as a warning. -- Mason Cooley
Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring. -- Mason Cooley
What's the good of being stoical if nobody notices? -- Mason Cooley
Originality finds the unexpected but inevitable next step. -- Mason Cooley
Sometimes the given seems like something taken away. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom and fear keep us working and obeying the laws. -- Mason Cooley
A quick smile is more seductive than a slinky dress. -- Mason Cooley
The closeups of pornography make human genitals look like undiscovered prehistoric animals. -- Mason Cooley
A quiet fool can go undiscovered for a long time. -- Mason Cooley
When money disappears, we soon understand the power of absence. -- Mason Cooley
Courage, determination, and hard work are all very nice, but not so nice as an oil well in the back yard. -- Mason Cooley
Every perversion has survived many tests of its capabilities. -- Mason Cooley
Stutters and snorts are meaningful but not usually referential. -- Mason Cooley
Rebuttals never alter desire. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom has lost repute because it so often applies to a state of affairs that no longer exists. -- Mason Cooley
The interest in Wisdom is fading. Soon there will not be enough left to support the aphorism, even though it tries to amuse by half-mocking the Wisdom it propounds. -- Mason Cooley
Truth is a necessary phantom. -- Mason Cooley
Don't sacrifice yourself for me. I will not be grateful. -- Mason Cooley
Regretting the past does not prevent me from repeating it. -- Mason Cooley
My mother wanted to shrink from my clinging, but did not. -- Mason Cooley
In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners. -- Mason Cooley
I trust you because I need you. -- Mason Cooley
Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. -- Mason Cooley
The man in the street is always a stranger. -- Mason Cooley
Nature knows no difference between weeds and flowers. -- Mason Cooley
A free spirit must be able to surmount anxiety time after time. -- Mason Cooley
The banker rubs his nose, thinking of his cat stalking something on the lawn. -- Mason Cooley
Good deal: justice for you, mercy for me. -- Mason Cooley
Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom is founded on memory; happiness on forgetfulness. -- Mason Cooley
I really like life, don't you? There's nothing else quite like it. -- Mason Cooley
Leisure unmasks our weaknesses. -- Mason Cooley
I must like my profession, since I can hardly distinguish myself from it. -- Mason Cooley
Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings. -- Mason Cooley
Generosity knows how to count, but refrains. -- Mason Cooley
The writer considers sayability before anything else. -- Mason Cooley
Spirituality now wanders from sex to drugs to art to revolution to violence
whatever seems to promise deliverance from the quotidian. -- Mason Cooley
Age must give way to youth, no doubt. But not yet, not yet. -- Mason Cooley
Think carefully before asking for justice. Mercy might be safer. -- Mason Cooley
The right time to die is never exactly now. -- Mason Cooley
Living alone is good for privacy, bad for full-scale cooking and moving heavy furniture. -- Mason Cooley
Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed. -- Mason Cooley
Pride sings and dances; humility sighs. -- Mason Cooley
The transcendental promises a vacation from history. -- Mason Cooley
A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel. -- Mason Cooley
Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run. -- Mason Cooley
The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties. -- Mason Cooley
My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me. -- Mason Cooley
Suffering teaches us only that we suffer. Joy shows us which way to go. -- Mason Cooley
Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little. -- Mason Cooley
There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them. -- Mason Cooley
Often, when I want to consult my impulses, I cannot find them. -- Mason Cooley
The tragic hero prefers death to prudence. The comedian prefers playing tricks to winning. Only the villain really plays to win. -- Mason Cooley
Sulking is silent because speaking would reveal its folly. -- Mason Cooley
Political correctness is driving machismo underground and recalling effeminacy from exile. -- Mason Cooley
Every lover's lament has an element of boasting. -- Mason Cooley
Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes. -- Mason Cooley
Cynicism formulates issues clearly, but only to dismiss them. -- Mason Cooley
If I had found the words I was looking for, I would not have read so much. -- Mason Cooley
The New Right: kiss the bankers and spank the babies. -- Mason Cooley
My regimen is lust and avarice for exercise, gluttony and sloth for relaxation. -- Mason Cooley
When disaster waves, I try not to wave back. -- Mason Cooley
I am plain-speaking out of both sides of my mouth. -- Mason Cooley
Never trust the judgment of an enthusiastic man; never trust the promises of a lazy one. -- Mason Cooley
Sign at the orgy: BODIES ONLY. -- Mason Cooley
It is hard to speak of sex without being clinical, brutal, or romantic. -- Mason Cooley
The eros of advertising is lurid but not specific. -- Mason Cooley
The critic roams through culture, looking for prey. -- Mason Cooley
King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us. -- Mason Cooley
Some marriages depend on domestic arguments the way the courts depend on litigation. -- Mason Cooley
People invent gods to explain their suffering. -- Mason Cooley
Children consider disliking their parents natural, but if the dislike is returned, they are outraged. -- Mason Cooley
I am no longer in love, but I still have my jealousy. -- Mason Cooley
Successful innovations become conventions. -- Mason Cooley
The nonsense that charms is close to sense. -- Mason Cooley
Falling in love is the right adventure for those who dislike sports and travel. -- Mason Cooley
Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centered. -- Mason Cooley
The modernist writers found despair inspirational. -- Mason Cooley
The rich are never as possessed by their riches as the poor are by their poverty. -- Mason Cooley
Carnal knowledge is as forgettable as the other kinds. -- Mason Cooley
Like other high subjects, the Law gives no ground to common sense. -- Mason Cooley
Hope, and hopelessness, persist despite the facts. -- Mason Cooley
The world needs an enema. -- Mason Cooley
Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood-thirsty. -- Mason Cooley
Why do we never expect dull people to be rascals? -- Mason Cooley
Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past. -- Mason Cooley
The muse is blind as Cupid and skittish as Diana. -- Mason Cooley
Against classical philosophy: thinking about eternity or the immensity of the universe does not lessen my unhappiness. -- Mason Cooley
Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean. -- Mason Cooley
Sensuality takes planning and work. -- Mason Cooley
Which is the supplement? Fantasy or daily routine? -- Mason Cooley
My neglected duties crowd around me in my dreams, murmuring. -- Mason Cooley
Some subjects come up suddenly in our speech and cannot be silenced. -- Mason Cooley
Consensus is usually made possible by vague language and shallow commitments. -- Mason Cooley
I do not regret the folly of my youth, but the timidity. -- Mason Cooley
Flatter me, but delicately, please, for I am fastidious. -- Mason Cooley
My father was a patriarch inside a matriarchy, but never knew it. -- Mason Cooley
Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations. -- Mason Cooley
Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant. -- Mason Cooley
Outside books, we avoid colorful characters. -- Mason Cooley
Maxims are sharp-edged half-truths. -- Mason Cooley
Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead. -- Mason Cooley
In middle age, going naked contributes little to public enjoyment. -- Mason Cooley
The truths I shun follow me, mumbling. -- Mason Cooley
The winner gives up his chance to be a good sport. -- Mason Cooley
If I could do my life over, I would try to cleanse at least my pleasures of self-pity. -- Mason Cooley
Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it. -- Mason Cooley
In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields. -- Mason Cooley
Men and women would be even more unhappy if they really understood one another. -- Mason Cooley
Discontented women dream of being rescued by Prince Charming. Discontented men dream of finding a horny blond in the back seat ofa taxi. -- Mason Cooley
Tears are great peace-makers. -- Mason Cooley
Self-reform is the only kind that works. -- Mason Cooley
At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly. -- Mason Cooley
The more learned a writer, the more digression beckons him. -- Mason Cooley
Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description. -- Mason Cooley
Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth. -- Mason Cooley
Fortuna likes to find a crowd and follow it. -- Mason Cooley
Dieting is our last tie with asceticism. -- Mason Cooley
Thoughts can be revised. Deeds cannot. -- Mason Cooley
Flattery has to overcome my mistrust, and it does. -- Mason Cooley
Trust, but look for the exits. -- Mason Cooley
I do not remember joy or sorrow in childhood, but listening for clues. -- Mason Cooley
Lonely people keep up a ceaseless flow of commentary on themselves. -- Mason Cooley
Affection reproaches, but does not denounce. -- Mason Cooley
Couples who come to understand one another often part. -- Mason Cooley
Of course I want to be good, but that may not be to your advantage. -- Mason Cooley
In new situations, I look carefully at appearances. In familiar ones, I glance. -- Mason Cooley
As I review my life, I feel I must have missed the point, either then or now. -- Mason Cooley
Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation. -- Mason Cooley
Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us. -- Mason Cooley
Smiling half-reluctance seems to promise more than the frankest gesture of desire. -- Mason Cooley
When courtesy fails, be nasty, brutish, and short. -- Mason Cooley
The older we become, the more certain our future. -- Mason Cooley
We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled. -- Mason Cooley
Age: I go slower as time goes faster. -- Mason Cooley
Dirty old men, ignoring society, continue to follow nature. -- Mason Cooley
Inevitably, almost everything we say is either quotation or paraphrase. -- Mason Cooley
I gulp down my pleasures, chew over my miseries. -- Mason Cooley
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations. -- Mason Cooley
Every good time that goes on too long turns into a hell. -- Mason Cooley
Jealousy is inconsolable because it cannot know the beloved -- Mason Cooley
To succeed, find the right rut and stay with it. -- Mason Cooley
A neurotic can neither enjoy his illusions nor give them up. -- Mason Cooley
Antagonistic cooperation is the principle of all markets and many marriages. -- Mason Cooley
With age, comfort becomes more seductive than beauty. -- Mason Cooley
Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape. -- Mason Cooley
To remain mysterious, say little and do nothing. -- Mason Cooley
Money gives me more energy than all the Granola bars in the world. -- Mason Cooley
Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life. -- Mason Cooley
Few things are worth doing perfectly. -- Mason Cooley
Unconditional love is a lofty ideal, but unconditional hate is a fact well documented by history. -- Mason Cooley
When my expectations are exactly fulfilled, I feel that something uncanny has happened. -- Mason Cooley
The wisdom of age: don't stop walking. -- Mason Cooley
Style disdains comfort and is always ready to sacrifice virtue. -- Mason Cooley
In adding up her assets, the ambitious lady calculated the worth of her beautiful body as coldly as everything else. -- Mason Cooley
Faith prefers the absurd to the plausible. -- Mason Cooley
There is a line between a definite maybe and an indefinite yes. -- Mason Cooley
Old age learns about less after a lifetime of more. -- Mason Cooley
In a strange city, I connect through food and fantasy. -- Mason Cooley
Old photograph: amid the set poses of her family, a young girl smiles and raises her hand a little. -- Mason Cooley
I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly. -- Mason Cooley
What I eat turns into my body. What I read turns into my mind. -- Mason Cooley
A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought? -- Mason Cooley
A sympathetic look always makes me feel sorry for myself. -- Mason Cooley
The desire to perform impedes conversation. -- Mason Cooley
Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers. -- Mason Cooley
Vice is a dreary business. And virtue is not a lot of fun, either. -- Mason Cooley
Lovers remain in the dark, working hard to keep out daylight. -- Mason Cooley
As the tenor roars his passion, I think sadly of my spreading middle, and his. -- Mason Cooley
True self is the part of us that does not change when circumstances do. -- Mason Cooley
A budget takes the fun out of money. -- Mason Cooley
To appear well dressed, be skinny and tall. -- Mason Cooley
The aftermath of joy is not usually more joy. -- Mason Cooley
God may be a human creation, but He goes His way, not ours. -- Mason Cooley
If you have no power, talk about your influence. If you have power, talk about the constraints that hem you in. -- Mason Cooley
Don't stare into a mirror when you are trying to solve a problem. -- Mason Cooley
People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much. -- Mason Cooley
Cynicism is full of naive disappointments. -- Mason Cooley
The real reality is always just around the corner. -- Mason Cooley
Belief forages, moving from pasture to pasture. -- Mason Cooley
The rich feel full of merit. -- Mason Cooley
Sexual boredom is ousting sexual deviance as the problem. -- Mason Cooley
Explanations comfort us by giving the impression that there is an order in things. -- Mason Cooley
The Olympian gods cannot have grand passions because they cannot die. -- Mason Cooley
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. -- Mason Cooley
Self-realization is a comedown from salvation, but still gives us something to hope for. -- Mason Cooley
After Voltaire: envy is chained to the portico of the temple of glory and can neither enter nor leave. -- Mason Cooley
If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire. -- Mason Cooley
Literature may be false, but it is not trivial. -- Mason Cooley
Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself. -- Mason Cooley
The best hand always believes in playing by the rules. -- Mason Cooley
God makes the covenant, and observes it as He pleases. -- Mason Cooley
Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation. -- Mason Cooley
Duty is whatever opposes inclination. -- Mason Cooley
The unknowable creates the greatest controversies. -- Mason Cooley
Rule of criticism: only attend to the shape, and the purpose will manifest itself. -- Mason Cooley
Rereading, we find a new book -- Mason Cooley
Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out. -- Mason Cooley
People who behave at forty as they did at twenty must sometimes wonder why their charm is not working. -- Mason Cooley
Why is it forbidden in New York to acknowledge the charm and beauty of Los Angeles? -- Mason Cooley
Courage overrides self-doubt, but does not end it. -- Mason Cooley
The higher the moral tone, the more suspect the speaker. -- Mason Cooley
Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean. -- Mason Cooley
Genius knows where the questions are hidden. -- Mason Cooley
As desire recedes, the world becomes clear, pale, and empty. -- Mason Cooley
An imprudent enemy is less dangerous than an imprudent friend. -- Mason Cooley
Liberal Doctrine: it is not children who misbehave, but parents. -- Mason Cooley
Growth provides novel experiences for youth; decay the same, alas, for age. -- Mason Cooley
Memory is imagination pinned down. -- Mason Cooley
To be fulfilled, a prophecy needs lots of flexibility. -- Mason Cooley
A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does. -- Mason Cooley
Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring. -- Mason Cooley
A dirty mind is a rich inner resource. -- Mason Cooley
Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others. -- Mason Cooley
Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues. -- Mason Cooley
The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path. -- Mason Cooley
Folly always knows the answer. -- Mason Cooley
Pedagogical romances leave the mentor disgruntled, the pupil confused. -- Mason Cooley
Charity does not like arithmetic; selfishness worships it. -- Mason Cooley
To a suicide: You just poisoned the wrong person. -- Mason Cooley
It's no good being exclusive if nobody wants in. -- Mason Cooley
Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating. -- Mason Cooley
If you belong to the underclass, you are already guilty. -- Mason Cooley
If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined. -- Mason Cooley
The harp is an insipid instrument
no good for dancing, feasting, or marching, only for sitting primly in a parlor or on a cloud. -- Mason Cooley
Funerals prove that someone is really gone. -- Mason Cooley
Life is struggle and sleep. -- Mason Cooley
Universal truths have become an embarrassment, but they won't quite go away. -- Mason Cooley
New York is full of abandoned churches. A Godless city, but full of superstitions on every subject
art, money, sex, food, health. -- Mason Cooley
Don't tell me it's raining when you're peeing on me! -- Mason Cooley
Happiness is often hard-hearted. -- Mason Cooley
Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten. -- Mason Cooley
When my beloved arrives, I yawn. When my beloved departs, I weep. -- Mason Cooley
Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness. -- Mason Cooley
Warning: fortune cookies don't care what happens to you. -- Mason Cooley
To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove. -- Mason Cooley
Experience teaches us, but we scarcely know what. -- Mason Cooley
Neat trick: to be roused to ambition and reconciled to one's mediocrity at the same time. -- Mason Cooley
Living too long exacts a painful price. -- Mason Cooley
Faith no doubt moves mountains, but not necessarily to where we want them. -- Mason Cooley
In philosophy, the principles are more interesting than the examples. In literature, the examples are more interesting than the principles. -- Mason Cooley
Regret leads to overeating and naps. -- Mason Cooley
Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation. -- Mason Cooley
Complainers change their complaints, but they never reduce the amount of time spent in complaining. -- Mason Cooley
Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas. -- Mason Cooley
Hope and despair ignore one another's cries. -- Mason Cooley
Those who refuse to play second fiddle may wind up playing no fiddle at all. -- Mason Cooley
Lies and promises are necessary but not sufficient. -- Mason Cooley
The magic of procedure: do this after that and thus before so; then your wish will be granted. -- Mason Cooley
Many try to force the past to change. -- Mason Cooley
The self-righteous rule out the possibility that they are what has gone wrong. -- Mason Cooley
Sometimes the only way to become grounded is to hit bottom. -- Mason Cooley
No one could be the way I remember my father. -- Mason Cooley
I change my opinions often, but not my way of thinking. -- Mason Cooley
To avoid tripping on the chain of the past, you have to pick it up and wind it about you. -- Mason Cooley
Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret. -- Mason Cooley
Proverbial wisdom counsels against risk and change. But sitting ducks fare worst of all. -- Mason Cooley
Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits. -- Mason Cooley
When lying to someone, look him straight in the eye. -- Mason Cooley
I want to appear ordinary, but I have it understood that I am not. -- Mason Cooley
Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country. -- Mason Cooley
As children, our protests availed little. As adults, the same. -- Mason Cooley
We understand through resemblance. -- Mason Cooley
Rule of science: only exclude purpose, and Nature will reveal her causes. -- Mason Cooley
Complainers detest each other. -- Mason Cooley
A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats. -- Mason Cooley
Was there little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false? -- Mason Cooley
Lechery is secretive, but must finally reveal itself to at least one. -- Mason Cooley
Truth can remain silent. Lies must be spoken. -- Mason Cooley
Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself. -- Mason Cooley
Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight. -- Mason Cooley
Your love for me is founded in a sentiment. My love for you is founded in the body. A precarious interchange. -- Mason Cooley
Music dissolves the straight and narrow. -- Mason Cooley
The language of pornography is abusive, that of romance adoring. Both are addressed to a fetish. -- Mason Cooley
Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence. -- Mason Cooley
Think of the many different relations of form and content. E.g., the many pairs of trousers and what's in them. -- Mason Cooley
In even the happiest love story, the World wins at last. -- Mason Cooley
Diplomats lie with a heavy sense of destiny. -- Mason Cooley
Family romances are the only ones that never turn out happily. -- Mason Cooley
The extravagance of intellect outstrips the extravagance of desire. -- Mason Cooley
Confess to the misdeeds you cannot hide. -- Mason Cooley
A sheep who goes looking for a wolf is sure to find one. -- Mason Cooley
Revenge is sweet but not nourishing. -- Mason Cooley
My young friend supposes his ingenuousness is merely a ruse. -- Mason Cooley
The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated. -- Mason Cooley
What lies behind appearance is usually another appearance. -- Mason Cooley
Man invented the gods. Then the gods went off on their own, but not far. -- Mason Cooley
Doubt is long-winded. Certainty is brief. -- Mason Cooley
The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life. -- Mason Cooley
Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can. -- Mason Cooley
Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom. -- Mason Cooley
My parents wanted me to solace them for sorrows they denied having had. -- Mason Cooley
Nudity is the costume of lovers and corpses. -- Mason Cooley
With every physical pain, my moral fibre unravels a little. -- Mason Cooley
I love money, but will money ever love me in return? -- Mason Cooley
Curiosity engenders both science and scandal. -- Mason Cooley
Retirement is a one-way trip to insignificance. -- Mason Cooley
Self-pity makes people callous. -- Mason Cooley
The flesh of past lovers looks both familiar and strange. -- Mason Cooley
I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy. -- Mason Cooley
My father liked to moralize, and so do I. But he was in earnest, while I am embarrassed and pretend that I am merely being witty. -- Mason Cooley
The depressed fall back exhausted from every undertaking. -- Mason Cooley
Dreams are distorted representations of desire. So are dream- analyses. -- Mason Cooley
Many attempt to harvest what was never planted. -- Mason Cooley
No one can remember himself as an unpleasant child. -- Mason Cooley
Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never. -- Mason Cooley
City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life. -- Mason Cooley
Giving out crowns to everyone will not make a nation of kings. -- Mason Cooley
The desire to be significant casts a pall. -- Mason Cooley
When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it. -- Mason Cooley
Hope likes justification, but can do without. -- Mason Cooley
Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it. -- Mason Cooley
Nostalgia paints a smile on the stony face of the past. -- Mason Cooley
Too timid to talk back, I shot my adversary. -- Mason Cooley
A beautiful woman peers out her window, as full of envy as the harridan who peers up at her from the street. -- Mason Cooley
Fail, and your friends feel superior. Succeed, and they feel resentful. -- Mason Cooley
Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over. -- Mason Cooley
Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you. -- Mason Cooley
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting. -- Mason Cooley
Wit: a whim followed by a wham. -- Mason Cooley
The bathroom scale knows nothing of extenuating circumstances. -- Mason Cooley
Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse. -- Mason Cooley
To be successful be ahead of your time, but only a little. -- Mason Cooley
Unhappiness is too common to call for special measures. -- Mason Cooley
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort. -- Mason Cooley
Reason is sight. Instinct is touch. Intuition is smell. -- Mason Cooley
Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end. -- Mason Cooley
Acknowledge your limitations or they will tyrannize over you. -- Mason Cooley
Politics inflame the passions in a way that few beloveds can match. -- Mason Cooley
Modernized by tin roofs and T-shirts, Third World poverty is no longer picturesque. -- Mason Cooley
Progress may feel more like loss than gain. -- Mason Cooley
Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it. -- Mason Cooley
Most people regard getting their way as a matter of simple justice. -- Mason Cooley
silence is the most intolerable of answers. -- Mason Cooley
Inequality is a fact. Equality is a value. -- Mason Cooley
Never try to leap from a standstill. -- Mason Cooley
Learned researches lead to headaches, constipation, and befuddled quarreling. -- Mason Cooley
Guilt stirs me, but only to self-pity. -- Mason Cooley
The passions are the same in every conflict, large or small. -- Mason Cooley
In the theater of confusion, knowing the location of the exits is what counts. -- Mason Cooley
Like an electric tea-kettle, pornography comes to a boil very fast. -- Mason Cooley
If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether. -- Mason Cooley
Habit keeps my life going, with occasional pushes from desire. -- Mason Cooley
With decrepitude, longevity has overshot the mark. -- Mason Cooley
The parade was here, but it disappeared around a corner. -- Mason Cooley
The dignified catastrophes of tragedy bear little resemblance to the slow ruin inflicted by life. -- Mason Cooley
Reading civilized the inner life. -- Mason Cooley
Enjoy the insult as you deliver it, before you learn its cost. -- Mason Cooley
If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism. -- Mason Cooley
The time I kill is killing me. -- Mason Cooley
Failures are easier to repeat than successes. -- Mason Cooley
A: Everything changes. B: But not enough. -- Mason Cooley
The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow. -- Mason Cooley
Failure makes us envious. Success makes us greedy. -- Mason Cooley
Old and young disbelieve one another's truths. -- Mason Cooley
Jargon: any technical language we do not understand. -- Mason Cooley
To postpone unpleasantness is human; to forget it is divine. -- Mason Cooley
Go ahead and voice your criticisms, but don't expect to be invited back. -- Mason Cooley
The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling. -- Mason Cooley
Vacations prove that a life of pleasure is overrated. -- Mason Cooley
Intelligence makes sincerity difficult. -- Mason Cooley
I would enjoy experiencing the hollowness of success at first- hand. -- Mason Cooley
Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry! -- Mason Cooley
The mind scolds the heart, which makes excuses and goes its own way. -- Mason Cooley
A modest demeanor arouses thoughts of seduction. -- Mason Cooley
Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism. -- Mason Cooley
Withhold admiration from a narcissist and be disliked. Give it and be treated with indifference. -- Mason Cooley
Beauty and virtue: the most kissable ass in the world is no guarantee of good intentions. -- Mason Cooley
Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky. -- Mason Cooley
Good manners can render even virtue tolerable. -- Mason Cooley
Swindlers are notoriously gullible. -- Mason Cooley
Self-conscious? Try a wig, a corset, a veil, a beard. Or cultivate shamelessness. -- Mason Cooley
The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past. -- Mason Cooley
To confer dignity, forgive. To express contempt, forget. -- Mason Cooley
Denial of one appetite sharpens the others. -- Mason Cooley
The most reliable pleasure afforded by theater is the intermission. -- Mason Cooley
Seek and Hide: the Lover gazes at the Beloved. The Beloved looks away. The Beloved turns and looks at the Lover. The Lover runs away. -- Mason Cooley
I regret. I apologize. I blame myself. I continue as before. -- Mason Cooley
The man of sensibility is too busy talking about his feelings to have time for good deeds. -- Mason Cooley
The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat. -- Mason Cooley
As a dream comes true, it falls flat. -- Mason Cooley
Vanity is easily duped. Ambition, not. -- Mason Cooley
Always clamping down on excitement is not self-control but fear. -- Mason Cooley
The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually. -- Mason Cooley
Only death rescues us from dying. -- Mason Cooley
Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other. -- Mason Cooley
Innocence: I am only stepping on your face because it lies in my path. -- Mason Cooley
Moderation in all things is best, but it's pretty hard to get excited about it. -- Mason Cooley
The real secrets are not the ones I tell. -- Mason Cooley
Commitments, not feelings, hold life together. -- Mason Cooley
When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings. -- Mason Cooley
Ideologies can survive hostility, but not indifference. -- Mason Cooley
Talk about yourself as much as you like, but do not expect others to listen. -- Mason Cooley
Self-criticism expands the opportunities for discourse and eliminates the need for an adversary. -- Mason Cooley
Later is always my first choice. -- Mason Cooley
Eccentricity is originality that leads nowhere. -- Mason Cooley
Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth -- Mason Cooley
Enough is ever-receding. -- Mason Cooley
Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth. -- Mason Cooley
Natural Man, in our current version, is a disgruntled adolescent. -- Mason Cooley
My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures. -- Mason Cooley
History takes place between the Fall and the Apocalypse, with a narrow escape route called Salvation. -- Mason Cooley
Most bad luck is the misfortune of not being an exception. -- Mason Cooley
Intelligence without power cannibalizes itself. -- Mason Cooley
Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully -- Mason Cooley
Advice is more agreeable in the mouth than in the ear. -- Mason Cooley
In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot. -- Mason Cooley
We do justice coldly, injustice hotly. -- Mason Cooley
Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand. -- Mason Cooley
You gave me a significant look, but significant of what? -- Mason Cooley
Death promises nothing
not even oblivion. -- Mason Cooley
Only those in comfortable circumstances think love is the most important thing. -- Mason Cooley
After desolation, grief brings back our humanity -- Mason Cooley
We make some changes. But mostly changes make us. -- Mason Cooley
The plastic surgeon's knife slashes at time, which may seem to retreat, but then keeps on coming. -- Mason Cooley
A sense of righteousness is even more dangerous than a violent temper. -- Mason Cooley
As an elder I mistrust the wisdom of age. -- Mason Cooley
In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words. -- Mason Cooley
The chair as ideas fits only the bottom as idea. -- Mason Cooley
Most of us live in a world that has ceased to exist. -- Mason Cooley
Intelligence is predatory, but full of fastidiousness and frights. -- Mason Cooley
A quiet well-behaved boy is likely to be both frightened and ambitious. -- Mason Cooley
The supposed unhappiness of the rich is always a cheerful topic of conversation. -- Mason Cooley
Theory now: concern for truth must not hobble our discussion. -- Mason Cooley
The sun cares nothing for illumination. -- Mason Cooley
Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere. -- Mason Cooley
Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities. -- Mason Cooley
Fear of my cruel impulses makes me kind. -- Mason Cooley
It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting. -- Mason Cooley
When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent. -- Mason Cooley
Rescue someone unwilling to look after himself, and he will cling to you like a dangerous illness. -- Mason Cooley
The public is a hibernating bear, hard to awaken and fond of honey. -- Mason Cooley
Great talkers do not stop for breath, and never look at the clock. -- Mason Cooley
When understanding would be too difficult, I become trusting. -- Mason Cooley
Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it. -- Mason Cooley
Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real. -- Mason Cooley
Hatred makes me energetic, but confused. -- Mason Cooley
Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind. -- Mason Cooley
Our most important decisions are made while we are thinking about something else. -- Mason Cooley
The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives. -- Mason Cooley
I did not know I was in my prime until afterwards. -- Mason Cooley
A Museum of fetishes would give special attention to the history of underwear. -- Mason Cooley
Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings. -- Mason Cooley
Loneliness is more likely to lead to fussy housekeeping than to grand views of the Universe. -- Mason Cooley
The question you're not supposed to ask is the important one. -- Mason Cooley
I wish you joy of your unhappiness, since you cling to it so. -- Mason Cooley
Curiosity is an asset mostly frittered away. -- Mason Cooley
The morose one refuses to smile even when he has just had his teeth cleaned. -- Mason Cooley
In art, a dress is never just a dress; nor in life either. -- Mason Cooley
Always late: thus I make you the prisoner of my freedom. -- Mason Cooley
I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else. -- Mason Cooley
Aphorisms are not true or false, but pointed or flat. -- Mason Cooley
I obey my own commands about as often as others do. -- Mason Cooley
The grandeur of a philosophy does not certify its truth. -- Mason Cooley
Pornography supplies the only really safe sex. -- Mason Cooley
I put second things first, and then worry about first things. -- Mason Cooley
The mind demands rules; the facts demand exceptions. -- Mason Cooley
Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point. -- Mason Cooley
I love you in my dreams, but not in real life. -- Mason Cooley
Curiosity makes loneliness. -- Mason Cooley
Skepticism does not preserve us from foolhardy deeds. -- Mason Cooley
When sages commend excess, Desire is sick. -- Mason Cooley
Alzheimer's usually comes later than AIDS, but I decline to call that progress. -- Mason Cooley
Life just keeps unfolding, ignoring our praise or blame. -- Mason Cooley
I like the old wisdom
puns, riddles, spells, proverbs. -- Mason Cooley
Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports. -- Mason Cooley
Pornography and cooking shows have created two new spectator sports. -- Mason Cooley
Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role. -- Mason Cooley
Comedy distances pain, but leaves signs of it everywhere. -- Mason Cooley
Our troubles keep us going. -- Mason Cooley
Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority. -- Mason Cooley
Love talks and talks. Lust is brief and to the point. -- Mason Cooley
Stupidity is a fact of life, but unmentionable. The new Prudery. -- Mason Cooley
Mortality: not acquittal but a series of postponements is what we hope for. -- Mason Cooley
Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed. -- Mason Cooley
The perfect aphorism would achieve classical balance and then immediately upset it. -- Mason Cooley
New York loves itself in an unkind and fanatical way. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom turns to panic if my beloved leaves before the usual time. -- Mason Cooley
If you insist on asking me why I feel the way I do, I plan to take the Fifth Amendment. -- Mason Cooley
Promiscuity turns sex into a sport, like arm-wrestling. -- Mason Cooley
Lovers do all the talking and writing. What are the Beloveds thinking? -- Mason Cooley
I know that I am very much like everybody else, but not really. -- Mason Cooley
Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine. -- Mason Cooley
The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down. -- Mason Cooley
Beggars beg to get money, not to reproach the passerby. -- Mason Cooley
Dutch painting: daily life is enough. -- Mason Cooley
Sophistication knows the score, but is powerless to change it. -- Mason Cooley
Something is sticking out its tongue at me from the corner of my mirror. -- Mason Cooley
Some live in a state of passionate indecision. -- Mason Cooley
To avoid eye contact, kiss. -- Mason Cooley
Nature often seems like an idea that has had its day. -- Mason Cooley
In the museums, everything is in quotation marks. -- Mason Cooley
In retirement, only money and symptoms are consequential. -- Mason Cooley
The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life. -- Mason Cooley
Worry is not thought; complaining is not action. -- Mason Cooley
Reading gives us a place to go when we have no where to go -- Mason Cooley
Fruitless striving breeds less despair than inaction. -- Mason Cooley
People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art. -- Mason Cooley
Undecidability is a useful category even in dealing with restaurant menus. -- Mason Cooley
Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure. -- Mason Cooley
Many pains are imaginary, but all joys are real. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom is dead. Long live information. -- Mason Cooley
When I go out, I hope to leave the worst of myself at home. -- Mason Cooley
Reading gives you some place to go when you have to stay where you are. -- Mason Cooley
In New York, pretending to be above the struggle means no seat on the bus and a table next to the kitchen. -- Mason Cooley
Flattery and insults raise the same question: what do you want? -- Mason Cooley
Only the most lucid can see their love as comedy. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom cannot prevent a fall, but may cushion it. -- Mason Cooley
Who would not give up wit for power and beauty? -- Mason Cooley
Tales of adultery are much improved by period costumes. -- Mason Cooley
As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance. -- Mason Cooley
Lawyers may reason powerfully, but power settles most issues. -- Mason Cooley
Authority is conferred by position, not character. -- Mason Cooley
Dreams surround our desires with ugliness and dread. -- Mason Cooley
When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say. -- Mason Cooley
Your vanity and my vanity will never be friends. -- Mason Cooley
Friendship is love minus sex and plus reason. Love is friendship plus sex minus reason -- Mason Cooley
Documents create a paper reality we call proof. -- Mason Cooley
The shades of respectability begin to close about the greying head. -- Mason Cooley
Boast quietly, with decorum. -- Mason Cooley
In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise. -- Mason Cooley
Bravery despite defeat is praiseworthy. Victory despite cowardice is beyond praise. -- Mason Cooley
My struggles with myself seldom reach aerobic level. -- Mason Cooley
If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation. -- Mason Cooley
The sacred is found boring by many who find the uncanny fascinating. -- Mason Cooley
What is Providence for you may be Nemesis for me. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorism offers a momentary sense of mastery over some confusion or unhappiness. -- Mason Cooley
Talk shows are proof that conversation is dead. -- Mason Cooley
The little suckings and smackings of the perversions are the sounds of joyous infancy. -- Mason Cooley
Conscience is the moralized form of self-absorption. -- Mason Cooley
Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious. -- Mason Cooley
Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters. -- Mason Cooley
Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter. -- Mason Cooley
A dense undergrowth of extension cords sustains my upper world of lights, music, and machines of comfort. -- Mason Cooley
The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul. -- Mason Cooley
Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence. -- Mason Cooley
The best propaganda omits rather than invents -- Mason Cooley
Self-hatred is sometimes appropriate. -- Mason Cooley
Good parties create a temporary youthfulness. -- Mason Cooley
The young have stolen our youthfulness, and flaunt it without shame. -- Mason Cooley
Reading a great book causes jolts and frights. -- Mason Cooley
The New York action painters want their pictures to jump off the walls and chase you down the street. -- Mason Cooley
Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there. -- Mason Cooley
The noble style immobilizes its subjects. -- Mason Cooley
The sorrow of not being movie stars overwhelms millions. -- Mason Cooley
Intellectuals have opinions on subjects they just heard about five minutes ago. -- Mason Cooley
A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes. -- Mason Cooley
Free competition exists inside shelters of law, custom, insurance, political approval, and carefully protected status. -- Mason Cooley
Small successes are still successes; great failures are still failures. -- Mason Cooley
The trouble with the young people today is that it is they who are young. -- Mason Cooley
Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame. -- Mason Cooley
Repetition comforts me for a time, then closes in. -- Mason Cooley
Both faith and cynicism make judgment too easy. -- Mason Cooley
Fears and lies intensify consciousness. -- Mason Cooley
The psychiatrist's office: the only place I can be sure my story will be treated as sad, but interesting. -- Mason Cooley
Reality is the name we give to our disappointments. -- Mason Cooley
The cow's point of view deserves more literary attention. -- Mason Cooley
If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting. -- Mason Cooley
Life is what it makes you. -- Mason Cooley
Imprudence gets us into more trouble than actual misdeeds do. -- Mason Cooley
Some eras worship infancy; some, the aged. None as yet has adored middle age. -- Mason Cooley
Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death. -- Mason Cooley
Ironic and jittery, we are puzzled by the old heroes with their fighting, boasting, and cocksure lovemaking. -- Mason Cooley
I tried good taste, but the strain was too much for me. -- Mason Cooley
Travelling carries me to the surface, away from the deeps of home-thoughts. -- Mason Cooley
Understanding replaces imaginary fears with real ones. -- Mason Cooley
We sometimes find truth, but more often it finds us. -- Mason Cooley
Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it. -- Mason Cooley
Life is always rich, thought only occasionally so. -- Mason Cooley
The party out of office becomes the articulate one. -- Mason Cooley
Helplessness is a mighty power. -- Mason Cooley
Like love, grief fades in and out. -- Mason Cooley
Blonds look angelic, but can (oh, happy!) be fleshy as well. -- Mason Cooley
Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead. -- Mason Cooley
Change is upsetting. Repetition is tedious. Three cheers for variation! -- Mason Cooley
Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation. -- Mason Cooley
Drugs bring us to to the gates of paradise, then keep us from entering. -- Mason Cooley
Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment. -- Mason Cooley
Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life. -- Mason Cooley
Machismo makes no provision for preparing lunch, doing the laundry, or minding the baby. -- Mason Cooley
Dogs often remind us of the human, ail-too human. Cats, never. -- Mason Cooley
Holding unconventional opinions makes people feel they have strong characters. -- Mason Cooley
Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories. -- Mason Cooley
As a child I was middle-aged and cautious compared to my impulsive father. -- Mason Cooley
In New York, one must collapse to be indolent. -- Mason Cooley
Sleepy-head is no longer aroused by tragic imaginings. -- Mason Cooley
Every farewell combines loss and new freedom. -- Mason Cooley
Self-sacrifice usually contains an unspoken demand for payment. -- Mason Cooley
The eye deals with excess more easily than the stomach does. -- Mason Cooley
If you are going to be rude, be quick about it. -- Mason Cooley
Irony dissolves sentiment, but occasionally a sentiment is strong enough to dissolve irony. -- Mason Cooley
Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime. -- Mason Cooley
Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale. -- Mason Cooley
Satire is born of the cities it denounces. -- Mason Cooley
The perfect pleasure: money is neither fattening nor immoral nor illegal. -- Mason Cooley
Good manners protect the privileged, but leave the unprivileged more vulnerable. -- Mason Cooley
Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise. -- Mason Cooley
The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental. -- Mason Cooley
Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book. -- Mason Cooley
I know God exits, but I don't know where. -- Mason Cooley
The realist lies for advantage. The fantasist lies to give his dreams a flavor of reality. -- Mason Cooley
The imaginary audience for my life is growing small and silent. -- Mason Cooley
The intimacy of love absolves us of our guilty separateness. -- Mason Cooley
When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines. -- Mason Cooley
Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck. -- Mason Cooley
Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting. -- Mason Cooley
If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist's office would be full of luminous ideas. -- Mason Cooley
Eternity eludes us, even as a thought. -- Mason Cooley
Sex and writing live on playful cruelties. -- Mason Cooley
Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows. -- Mason Cooley
I will not tolerate your faults. They are of no use to me. -- Mason Cooley
Grandiosity lessens as work proceeds. -- Mason Cooley
Beggars market their incapacity. -- Mason Cooley
Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful. -- Mason Cooley
Three meals plus bedtime make four sure blessings a day. -- Mason Cooley
Perversity depends on reversal and substitution. -- Mason Cooley
Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment. -- Mason Cooley
Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger. -- Mason Cooley
To understand a literary style, consider what it omits. -- Mason Cooley
I can imagine many things, but few clearly. -- Mason Cooley
Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art. -- Mason Cooley
The worship of Mammon may be vulgar or immoral, but it persists while other religions falter and disappear. -- Mason Cooley
Money is a better tonic than Geritol. -- Mason Cooley
Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves? -- Mason Cooley
Every doctrine has a theory of the beginning. -- Mason Cooley
Mind and body obstruct one another's pleasures. -- Mason Cooley
Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life. -- Mason Cooley
I feel affluent or not according to what part of town I am in. -- Mason Cooley
Anxiety and lust are evicting the older passions. -- Mason Cooley
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. -- Mason Cooley
Life is used up all the same, whether we save, spend, or waste it. -- Mason Cooley
Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening. -- Mason Cooley
Unlike art and sex, money always arouses interest. -- Mason Cooley
If folly disappeared, wit would starve. -- Mason Cooley
Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better. -- Mason Cooley
The exhibitionist loves to flirt with shame -- Mason Cooley
Fearful of sentimentality, I disown my tears and melting heart. -- Mason Cooley
Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future. -- Mason Cooley
The sheen of ocean gleams on the blue fish-plate. -- Mason Cooley
Orgies are an early form of what will someday become sex by committee. -- Mason Cooley
Metaphors convince at once or not at all. -- Mason Cooley
Electricity, water, gas, and steam course through the walls of my building, keeping it alive. -- Mason Cooley
I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds. -- Mason Cooley
While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote. -- Mason Cooley
Bored by safety, the lover grows jealous and exacting. -- Mason Cooley
Jokes are unanswerable objections. -- Mason Cooley
Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos. -- Mason Cooley
We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there. -- Mason Cooley
I am too impatient to wait for temptation to come to me. -- Mason Cooley
Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful. -- Mason Cooley
Even cats grow lonely and anxious. -- Mason Cooley
Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral. -- Mason Cooley
The ravaged face in the mirror hides the enchanting youth that is the real me. -- Mason Cooley
When a man bores a woman, she complains. When a woman bores a man, he ignores her. -- Mason Cooley
Chastity is now treated as a sexual problem. -- Mason Cooley
Being cultured is the least expensive form of respectability. -- Mason Cooley
To avoid doing anything, wait for the right circumstances. -- Mason Cooley
I am easy-going right up to the borders of my self-interest. -- Mason Cooley
The sentimental want to be thrilled by everything. -- Mason Cooley
Position yourself well enough, and circumstances will do the rest. -- Mason Cooley
All anger feels like righteous anger; sorrow does not care whether it is righteous or not. -- Mason Cooley
Out of power, Marxism can develop critical intelligence; in power, it quickly becomes stupid. -- Mason Cooley
The neuroses parody the virtues. -- Mason Cooley
Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage. -- Mason Cooley
We often mistake the original part of ourselves for a weakness. -- Mason Cooley
My mind no longer has romantic abysses, but has become shallow, with many little gaps and cracks. -- Mason Cooley
By the time I have clarified a thought, I no longer want to think it. -- Mason Cooley
Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard. -- Mason Cooley
I am only interested in money because everyone else is. -- Mason Cooley
A well-paid occupation is seldom spoken of as rewarding. -- Mason Cooley
For many, immaturity is an ideal, not a defect. -- Mason Cooley
A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet. -- Mason Cooley
Many count on their disadvantages to cover for them. -- Mason Cooley
After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy. -- Mason Cooley
Attaining even mediocrity is often a struggle. -- Mason Cooley
The young are amazed when they suffer. -- Mason Cooley
Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death. -- Mason Cooley
I answered my father's demands for sympathy with silence. -- Mason Cooley
Interpreting the dance: young women in white dancing in a ring can only be virgins; old women in black dancing in a ring can only be witches; but middle-aged women in colors, square dancing ... ? -- Mason Cooley
A goldfish is reason enough for living, if someone needs a reason. -- Mason Cooley
We express disappointment in everything except ourselves. -- Mason Cooley
The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind. -- Mason Cooley
Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are. -- Mason Cooley
The avant-garde is now stranded in the past. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorism is a slippery plaything. -- Mason Cooley
To avoid discord, never put two wise people in the same room. -- Mason Cooley
Young girls giggle with nervous delight at the erections they inspire. -- Mason Cooley
Fear of trying causes paralysis. Trying causes only trembling and sweating. -- Mason Cooley
Wisdom remembers. Happiness forgets. -- Mason Cooley
Kindness eases everything almost as much as money does. -- Mason Cooley
First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory. -- Mason Cooley
The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned. -- Mason Cooley
Attachments and bereavements are inseparable. -- Mason Cooley
The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little. -- Mason Cooley
Old men feel a slightly reluctant affection for one another. -- Mason Cooley
Your words and my words are the same, but not our meaning. -- Mason Cooley
Winning means outlasting everyone else. -- Mason Cooley
Saying "I feel guilty" is a mere form of words. Saying "I feel ashamed" is not. -- Mason Cooley
Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person. -- Mason Cooley
If the current is right, one can drift to success. -- Mason Cooley
Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder. -- Mason Cooley
An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult. -- Mason Cooley
To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks. -- Mason Cooley
Losing gracefully is commended but never chosen. -- Mason Cooley
I alternate between reading cook books and reading diet books. -- Mason Cooley
With age, the mind grows slower and more wily. -- Mason Cooley
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera. -- Mason Cooley
The gods are watching, but idly, yawning. -- Mason Cooley
The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth. -- Mason Cooley
The narcissist enjoys being looked at and not looking back. -- Mason Cooley
My reluctant charity shames both me and the recipient. -- Mason Cooley
Self-realization sounds good. But what if only an enraged dwarf emerges? -- Mason Cooley
Hatred observes with more care than love does. -- Mason Cooley
Yearning wants mostly to perpetuate itself. -- Mason Cooley
Children must be protected not because they are innocent but because they are powerless. -- Mason Cooley
Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one's behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete. -- Mason Cooley
To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme. -- Mason Cooley
Indifference creates an artificial peace. -- Mason Cooley
The villain may be good looking, but his smile is never quite right. -- Mason Cooley
If your nose is up in the air, you cannot see where you are going. -- Mason Cooley
Boredom makes me sleepy or restless. -- Mason Cooley
Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are. -- Mason Cooley
Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures. -- Mason Cooley
Lead the reader toward the thought, then stop a little short. -- Mason Cooley
Until I am ready to lose weight, I cannot see how fat I am. -- Mason Cooley
Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle. -- Mason Cooley
I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am. -- Mason Cooley
Saying "I love you" makes a demand, but creates no obligations. -- Mason Cooley
Money comes to life as it is spent. -- Mason Cooley
Scholarship can find little to say about the obvious. -- Mason Cooley
Looking backward at what has been lost, I feel sad, then indifferent, and at last relieved. -- Mason Cooley
As a child I was told by my parents that I was happy, but I did not believe them. -- Mason Cooley
A sure cure for boredom: fast until you are ravenous. -- Mason Cooley
Rule of religion: purpose breathes even in dirt and stones. -- Mason Cooley
Do as you like
if you know what it is. -- Mason Cooley
My mentors grow old and foolish. I am afraid. -- Mason Cooley
We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it. -- Mason Cooley
Timidity keeps me safe and sad in a narrow room. -- Mason Cooley
Pain pays no attention to moans or excuses. -- Mason Cooley
Sexual attraction makes the strangest bedfellows of all. -- Mason Cooley
Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure. -- Mason Cooley
Nobody likes to offer stupidity as an excuse. -- Mason Cooley
One eventually has enough even of oneself. -- Mason Cooley
Most people find just being themselves not enough of a show. -- Mason Cooley
Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them. -- Mason Cooley
Once I find the right maxim to apply, I feel that I have done all that can be expected of me. -- Mason Cooley
Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics. -- Mason Cooley
Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning. -- Mason Cooley
Sometimes "Yes" is rhetoric enough. -- Mason Cooley
The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch. -- Mason Cooley
At the end of every diet, the path curves back to the trough. -- Mason Cooley
True wit has a grave intention. -- Mason Cooley
Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most. -- Mason Cooley
My aspiration now is to get by luck what I could not get by merit. -- Mason Cooley
Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing. -- Mason Cooley
The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks. -- Mason Cooley
I like what I do for a living. I also like NOT doing it
perhaps even more. -- Mason Cooley
The idealist regards facts as provisional. -- Mason Cooley
Bad faith makes the most of every ambiguity. -- Mason Cooley
Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine. -- Mason Cooley
The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it. -- Mason Cooley
Cynicism often draws correct conclusions, but nobody could live by its lights. -- Mason Cooley
Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity. -- Mason Cooley
Self-congratulation pleases only the speaker. -- Mason Cooley
If you corner me, you are going to hear some unwelcome truths. -- Mason Cooley
Blackmail is one of the great pastimes of family life. -- Mason Cooley
The truth usually has a slightly ugly look. -- Mason Cooley
Infallibility and invincible ignorance are the same thing. -- Mason Cooley
Sacred texts always offend reason. -- Mason Cooley
Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions. -- Mason Cooley
Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is. -- Mason Cooley
Don't milk the cow too hard. She will kick you. -- Mason Cooley
Imagination awakens ambition, then causes it to lose its way. -- Mason Cooley
Necessity makes heroes of us all. -- Mason Cooley
Beauty is lyrical. Ugliness is elegiac. -- Mason Cooley
Many gloat over their own troubles. -- Mason Cooley
We are more tied to our faults than to our virtues. -- Mason Cooley
Suspense combines curiosity with fear and pulls them up a rising slope. -- Mason Cooley
After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success. -- Mason Cooley
Suspicion is the beginning of wisdom, and of madness. -- Mason Cooley
I am forbidden sugar, fat, and alcohol. So hooray, I guess, for oatmeal, lemon juice, and chicken soup. -- Mason Cooley
People often are unsure whether or not they are in love, but they generally know whether or not they are having sex. -- Mason Cooley
Frivolous sorrow is folly. Frivolous enjoyment is not. -- Mason Cooley
Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute. -- Mason Cooley
No matter how close thought sticks to the actual, it follows its own rules. -- Mason Cooley
Treat unhappiness as a defect and fewer would embrace it -- Mason Cooley
To be sexy, nudes need a little underwear. -- Mason Cooley
Beautiful people are forgiven more often than the rest. -- Mason Cooley
Thrift is an attractive idea until you get down to specifics. -- Mason Cooley
I enjoy my rights, but I revel in my privileges. -- Mason Cooley
When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows. -- Mason Cooley
Cure for an obsession: get another one. -- Mason Cooley
Even alone we go on justifying ourselves. -- Mason Cooley
A moratorium on opportunities, please. I need to recover from the last one. -- Mason Cooley
The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition. -- Mason Cooley
Many who take up burdens come to resent being put upon. -- Mason Cooley
Malevolence is shameful but satisfying. -- Mason Cooley
A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it. -- Mason Cooley
I am interested in a hundred things, but only slightly. -- Mason Cooley
Disillusionment is not truth. -- Mason Cooley
Language cannot say everything, fortunately. -- Mason Cooley
Methodology gives those with no ideas something to do. -- Mason Cooley
Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables. -- Mason Cooley
Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment. -- Mason Cooley
Seeing my malevolent face in the mirror, my benevolent soul shrinks back. -- Mason Cooley
Original sin reassures us that our slip was not the first. -- Mason Cooley
Never lie in writing. -- Mason Cooley
In every death, a busy world comes to an end. -- Mason Cooley
Publish in haste and repent at leisure. -- Mason Cooley
I tried self-sacrifice a couple of times in my youth. -- Mason Cooley
Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you. -- Mason Cooley
Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology. -- Mason Cooley
More are weakened than strengthened by their troubles. -- Mason Cooley
The family is on its way out; couples go next; then no more keeping cats or parrots. -- Mason Cooley
The hero used to be the one in white. Now he is harder to spot. -- Mason Cooley
People are not the way they are primarily in order to annoy me. -- Mason Cooley
Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children. -- Mason Cooley
Consciousness is our only reprieve from Time. -- Mason Cooley
Self-blame usually has an undertone of self-congratulation. -- Mason Cooley
I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am. -- Mason Cooley
Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred. -- Mason Cooley
Only death goes deeper than sex. -- Mason Cooley
Even boredom has its crises. -- Mason Cooley
Worrying is as futile as boredom, but harder work. -- Mason Cooley
To understand someone, find out how he spends his money. -- Mason Cooley
English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere. -- Mason Cooley
A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach. -- Mason Cooley
Thought enables us to see Fate coming. -- Mason Cooley
Errors are more numerous than truths, but fortunately too divided among themselves to take power. -- Mason Cooley
Your need to talk does not create in me a need to listen. -- Mason Cooley
Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit. -- Mason Cooley
Constant talkers are unheard. -- Mason Cooley
Smooth white skin invites something that will leave a trace, a kiss or a slap. -- Mason Cooley
It is hard to tell truth, and hard not to. -- Mason Cooley
Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself. -- Mason Cooley
Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint. -- Mason Cooley
Cruelty is softened by fear, not pity. -- Mason Cooley
My secrets are petty but humiliating. -- Mason Cooley
The soul is no longer honored as it once was, but it still keeps appetite from being the measure of all things. -- Mason Cooley
Imprudence relies on luck, prudence on method. That gives prudence less edge than it expects. -- Mason Cooley
Everyone makes sexy sounds; relatively few, sexy sights. -- Mason Cooley
Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life. -- Mason Cooley
Sex is not imaginary, but it is not quite real either. -- Mason Cooley
Energy falls just short of being joy. -- Mason Cooley
The body has a mind of its own. -- Mason Cooley
Work saves us from melancholy. Pleasure exposes us to it. -- Mason Cooley
Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent. -- Mason Cooley
The life of pleasure breeds boredom. The life of duty breeds resentment. -- Mason Cooley
The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight. -- Mason Cooley
The aphorist is a hit and run artist. -- Mason Cooley
No dignity without distance. -- Mason Cooley
Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it. -- Mason Cooley
The past is ignorant of the present. Be careful in taking its advice. -- Mason Cooley
Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises. -- Mason Cooley
I am most drawn to writing when I have something else urgent to do. -- Mason Cooley
The lonely become either thoughtful or empty. -- Mason Cooley
Prudence does not save us, but shows us pictures of our destroyers. -- Mason Cooley
Between repetition and forgetting, it is a marvel that a new thought ever struggles into existence. -- Mason Cooley
Good books do not make people wiser or happier
only more conscious. -- Mason Cooley
All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love. -- Mason Cooley
Even in rapture, part of the mind watches. -- Mason Cooley
Alone, lonely people talk to themselves. In company, they often continue. -- Mason Cooley
A successful restaurant makes everything in it, including the patrons, seem a little better than they are. -- Mason Cooley
I see what you mean, but I do not think what you think. -- Mason Cooley
The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree. -- Mason Cooley
The price of telling your troubles is having to listen to advice. -- Mason Cooley
The unhappy are prisoners of a single round of thought. -- Mason Cooley
I can neither return your love nor dismiss it. -- Mason Cooley
I create my social existence by earning and spending. -- Mason Cooley