Mason Cooley Quotes

My mind no longer has romantic abysses, but has become shallow, with many little gaps and cracks.

The young are just as opinionated as the old, but have more exciting things to do than sit around airing their opinions all day.

Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.

Good manners can render even virtue tolerable.

Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.

A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.

Orgies are an early form of what will someday become sex by committee.

Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life.

Kindness eases everything almost as much as money does.

Boast quietly, with decorum.

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.

We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled.

The lover as baby is a less troubling idea than the baby as lover.

When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings.

Inconsistency has been overpraised by people who do not expect to suffer from it.

Reason is sight. Instinct is touch. Intuition is smell.

Anyone who feels like a fool has made a good beginning.

No use saying necessity is making a mistake.

You are so tactful that I have no idea what you want.

Losing gracefully is commended but never chosen.

For many, immaturity is an ideal, not a defect.

If we knew enough, fortune would turn out to be nature.

Even cats grow lonely and anxious.

Lovers remain in the dark, working hard to keep out daylight.

While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.

As every cockroach knows, thriving on poisons is the secret of success.

I pursue pleasure, but stingily, suspiciously.

Nothing is more cheerful than talking about our friends' shortcomings.

Life just keeps unfolding, ignoring our praise or blame.

As a comforter, philosophy cannot compete with a good dinner.

Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.

Fear of my cruel impulses makes me kind.

Suffering teaches us only that we suffer. Joy shows us which way to go.

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

Clothes make the body both mysterious and historical.

I know that I am very much like everybody else, but not really.

Stupidity is a fact of life, but unmentionable. The new Prudery.

At sixty, I would like to give my future back its vistas of uncertainty.

Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse.

Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.

A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does.

I feel that I have something significant to say, but I cannot think what it is.

Many try to force the past to change.

Nobody likes to offer stupidity as an excuse.

Acknowledge your limitations or they will tyrannize over you.

Laughter and tears may not persuade, but they cannot be refuted.

Thought enables us to see Fate coming.

Ideologies can survive hostility, but not indifference.