Mason Cooley Quotes

In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields.

Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten.

Good manners protect the privileged, but leave the unprivileged more vulnerable.

The soul is no longer honored as it once was, but it still keeps appetite from being the measure of all things.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

Hatred observes with more care than love does.

Fear regulates. Appetite impels.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence.

Guilt stirs me, but only to self-pity.

After Voltaire: envy is chained to the portico of the temple of glory and can neither enter nor leave.

To understand someone, find out how he spends his money.

After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.

Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life.

If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism.

Human nature is a scoundrel's favorite explanation.

Cynicism often draws correct conclusions, but nobody could live by its lights.

An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie.

The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.

Life is struggle and sleep.

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

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.

Like other high subjects, the Law gives no ground to common sense.

Self-criticism expands the opportunities for discourse and eliminates the need for an adversary.

The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.

The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition.

Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it.

Many pains are imaginary, but all joys are real.

Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.

Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them.

Worrying is as futile as boredom, but harder work.

Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?

The man in the street is always a stranger.

I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am.

After sixty, the self-questioning of middle age is obsolete.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

The New Right: kiss the bankers and spank the babies.

Most of us live in a world that has ceased to exist.

Complainers change their complaints, but they never reduce the amount of time spent in complaining.

Our punning minds rejoin what logic has separated.

Fear of trying causes paralysis. Trying causes only trembling and sweating.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Mortality: not acquittal but a series of postponements is what we hope for.

Love Songs Now: Fewer broken hearts, more sexual misery.

I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.

The self-righteous feel no need to be charming, and thus double their offensiveness.

Opportunity often goes begging. Luck, never.