Top 100 Mason Cooley Quotes
#1. I win on my merits; my opponents win by cheating.
Mason Cooley
#2. The eros of advertising is lurid but not specific.
Mason Cooley
#3. The self-righteous rule out the possibility that they are what has gone wrong.
Mason Cooley
#5. In youth, love and art. In age, investments and antiques.
Mason Cooley
#8. With age, I have become both more pious and more shameless.
Mason Cooley
#9. Like a frog, the aphorist waits for something to fly by that he can catch with his tongue.
Mason Cooley
#10. Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.
Mason Cooley
#11. Only the most lucid can see their love as comedy.
Mason Cooley
#12. Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself.
Mason Cooley
#13. My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.
Mason Cooley
#14. In every death, a busy world comes to an end.
Mason Cooley
#15. The Media: bold sex and violence, timid politics and morals.
Mason Cooley
#16. I will not tolerate your faults. They are of no use to me.
Mason Cooley
#17. Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled.
Mason Cooley
#19. Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.
Mason Cooley
#21. Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.
Mason Cooley
#22. Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise.
Mason Cooley
#23. To be sexy, nudes need a little underwear.
Mason Cooley
#24. I dream of vague shapes that hint of my heart's desire.
Mason Cooley
#25. Intelligence is predatory, but full of fastidiousness and frights.
Mason Cooley
#26. Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you.
Mason Cooley
#27. Rule of criticism: only attend to the shape, and the purpose will manifest itself.
Mason Cooley
#28. Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery.
Mason Cooley
#29. I reject all evidence that my fabulous beloved is an ordinary person who worries, watches TV, and has bouts of indigestion.
Mason Cooley
#30. Drunks do not have friends, but accomplices.
Mason Cooley
#31. Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.
Mason Cooley
#32. Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.
Mason Cooley
#33. Anyone who feels like a fool has made a good beginning.
Mason Cooley
#34. Most people regard getting their way as a matter of simple justice.
Mason Cooley
#36. Moderation in all things is best, but it's pretty hard to get excited about it.
Mason Cooley
#38. Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.
Mason Cooley
#39. Smiling half-reluctance seems to promise more than the frankest gesture of desire.
Mason Cooley
#41. The lonely become either thoughtful or empty.
Mason Cooley
#42. The realist lies for advantage. The fantasist lies to give his dreams a flavor of reality.
Mason Cooley
#43. The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
Mason Cooley
#44. Sexual attraction makes the strangest bedfellows of all.
Mason Cooley
#45. If you should ever acknowledge my existence, I plan to snub you.
Mason Cooley
#46. F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that prolonging his adolescence would protect his talent.
Mason Cooley
#47. Consensus is usually made possible by vague language and shallow commitments.
Mason Cooley
#49. When you can't figure out what to do, it's time for a nap.
Mason Cooley
#50. The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.
Mason Cooley
#51. What is Providence for you may be Nemesis for me.
Mason Cooley
#52. 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
#55. The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.
Mason Cooley
#56. Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.
Mason Cooley
#57. The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty.
Mason Cooley
#58. I obey my own commands about as often as others do.
Mason Cooley
#59. I do not regret the folly of my youth, but the timidity.
Mason Cooley
#60. King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.
Mason Cooley
#61. Tales of adultery are much improved by period costumes.
Mason Cooley
#62. Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.
Mason Cooley
#63. The flesh of past lovers looks both familiar and strange.
Mason Cooley
#64. My regimen is lust and avarice for exercise, gluttony and sloth for relaxation.
Mason Cooley
#65. I love you in my dreams, but not in real life.
Mason Cooley
#66. A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.
Mason Cooley
#67. Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.
Mason Cooley
#68. All the powers of imagination combine in hypochondria.
Mason Cooley
#69. Good books do not make people wiser or happier
only more conscious.
Mason Cooley
#70. The modest youth somehow knows just what to do for the cameras.
Mason Cooley
#71. Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.
Mason Cooley
#72. I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.
Mason Cooley
#73. Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life.
Mason Cooley
#74. The madness of love can always be suspended
to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance.
Mason Cooley
#75. Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.
Mason Cooley
#76. Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.
Mason Cooley
#77. You are as happy as you think you are, but not necessarily as miserable as you imagine.
Mason Cooley
#78. Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief.
Mason Cooley
#79. Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand.
Mason Cooley
#80. Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
Mason Cooley
#81. Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure.
Mason Cooley
#83. The eye deals with excess more easily than the stomach does.
Mason Cooley
#84. Most of us live in a world that has ceased to exist.
Mason Cooley
#85. Man invented the gods. Then the gods went off on their own, but not far.
Mason Cooley
#88. Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight.
Mason Cooley
#89. Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.
Mason Cooley
#90. Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.
Mason Cooley
#92. 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
#94. After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.
Mason Cooley
#95. The past goes right on pulling me apart, though I can scarcely remember the people or the issues.
Mason Cooley
#96. It's no good being exclusive if nobody wants in.
Mason Cooley
#97. I tried self-sacrifice a couple of times in my youth.
Mason Cooley
#98. Some marriages depend on domestic arguments the way the courts depend on litigation.
Mason Cooley
#100. If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world.
Mason Cooley
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