Quotes by Mason Cooley

• Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centered.
• Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.
• Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
• Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure.
• Sloth, not ill-will, makes me unjust.
• Self-reform is the only kind that works.
• Seeing my malevolent face in the mirror, my benevolent soul shrinks back.
• Talk about yourself as much as you like, but do not expect others to listen.
• The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.
• Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.
• Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.
• The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
• The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
• The beloved is the ultimate fetish.
• The body has a mind of its own.
• Romantics consider common sense vulgar.
• The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort.
• Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.
• The gods are watching, but idly, yawning.
• The higher the moral tone, the more suspect the speaker.
• The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.
• Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.
• Often, when I want to consult my impulses, I cannot find them.
• Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.
• Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.
• Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love.
• Opportunity knocks, but doesn't always answer to its name.
• Orgasm: the genitals sneezing.
• Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine.
• Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.
• People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.
• Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.
• Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.
• Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm.
• Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.
• Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.
• The power of lying is much less than the power of what is not to be discussed.
• Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
• The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth.
• Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.
• Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.
• Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.
• Rereading, we find a new book.
• Rescue someone unwilling to look after himself, and he will cling to you like a dangerous illness.
• People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.
• Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?
• Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.
• We are more tied to our faults than to our virtues.
• We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled.
• Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening.
• What lies behind appearance is usually another appearance.
• When a man bores a woman, she complains. When a woman bores a man, he ignores her.
• When I prayed for success, I forgot to ask for sound sleep and good digestion.
• When sages commend excess, Desire is sick.
• The passion for money is never fickle.
• While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.
• Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.
• Why do we never expect dull people to be rascals?
• Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.
• Women encourage men to be childish, then scold them.
• Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.
• Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
• Young men preen. Old men scheme.
• Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
• Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.
• Many gloat over their own troubles.
• While there's life, there's fear.
• The wisdom of age: don't stop walking.
• The lonely become either thoughtful or empty.
• The man in the street is always a stranger.
• The man of sensibility is too busy talking about his feelings to have time for good deeds.
• The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
• The only peace is being out of earshot.
• The passions are the same in every conflict, large or small.
• The ravaged face in the mirror hides the enchanting youth that is the real me.
• The real secrets are not the ones I tell.
• The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.
• Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind.
• The time I kill is killing me.
• Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.
• There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.
• Think carefully before asking for justice. Mercy might be safer.
• Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.
• Three meals plus bedtime make four sure blessings a day.
• To be successful be ahead of your time, but only a little.
• To confer dignity, forgive. To express contempt, forget.
• To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
• To understand someone, find out how he spends his money.
• The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.
• The shades of respectability begin to close about the greying head.
• I love you is the inscription on Pandora's box.
• If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves.
• Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth.
• General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others.
• Good parties create a temporary youthfulness.
• Hatred observes with more care than love does.
• Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise.
• Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.
• Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.
• Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.
• I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am.
• For many, immaturity is an ideal, not a defect.
• I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.
• I see what you mean, but I do not think what you think.
• I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.
• Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.
• If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.
• If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism.
• If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire.
• If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation.
• I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am.
• Faith moves mountains, but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.
• Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality.
• Even boredom has its crises.
• Even cats grow lonely and anxious.
• Even the most fickle are faithful to a few bad habits.
• Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred.
• Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.
• Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
• Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.
• Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never.
• Fail, and your friends feel superior. Succeed, and they feel resentful.
• I did not know I was in my prime until afterwards.
• Families in which nothing is ever discussed usually have a lot not to discuss.
• Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.
• Fastidious taste makes enjoyment a struggle.
• Fears and lies intensify consciousness.
• Few artists can afford artistic temperament.
• Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs.
• First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
• Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?
• Folly always knows the answer.
• Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.
• If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.
• Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology.
• Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.
• Malice is always authentic and sincere.
• Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth.
• Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy.
• Eternity eludes us, even as a thought.
• Mind and body obstruct one another's pleasures.
• Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment.
• Mistakes are the only universal form of originality.
• Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.
• Money: power at its most liquid.
• Moo may represent an idea, but only the cow knows.
• Most people regard getting their way as a matter of simple justice.
• Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.
• My mind is led astray by every faint rustle.
• My parents wanted me to solace them for sorrows they denied having had.
• My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.
• My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures.
• Never ask a bore a question.
• Never try to leap from a standstill.
• No chaos, no creation. Evidence: the kitchen at mealtime.
• Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.
• In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be.
• Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten.
• Love begins with an image; lust with a sensation.
• If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements.
• Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.
• In bridge clubs and in councils of state, the passions are the same.
• In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.
• In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners.
• In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing.
• Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.
• Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.
• Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.
• In every death, a busy world comes to an end.
• It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.
• Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame.
• Listening to people keeps them entertained.
• Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation.
• Kindness eases everything almost as much as money does.
• Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
• Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.
• Don't stare into a mirror when you are trying to solve a problem.
• Consciousness is our only reprieve from Time.
• Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.
• Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.
• Cruelty is softened by fear, not pity.
• Cure for an obsession: get another one.
• Cynicism is full of naive disappointments.
• Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness.
• Documents create a paper reality we call proof.
• Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end.
• A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.
• Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life.
• An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie.
• Affection reproaches, but does not denounce.
• Complainers change their complaints, but they never reduce the amount of time spent in complaining.
• A blocked path also offers guidance.
• A blunt statement can be as false as any other.
• A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.
• A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.
• A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.
• After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.
• After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.
• An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.
• Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty.
• Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.
• City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.
• Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.
• Children now expect their parents to audition for approval.
• Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences.
• Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.
• At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.
• As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.
• Art seduces, but does not exploit.
• Optimism is infectious; remember to come equipped with laughter.
• Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.