Mason Cooley quotes:

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Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.
A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.
Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love.
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.
The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.
Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment.
Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences.
The wisdom of age: don't stop walking.
I love you is the inscription on Pandora's box.
Love begins with an image; lust with a sensation.
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.
Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs.
Opportunity knocks, but doesn't always answer to its name.
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.
Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.
The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth.
Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life.
Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty.
Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centered.
A blunt statement can be as false as any other.
My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.
Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?
While there's life, there's fear.
Think carefully before asking for justice. Mercy might be safer.
If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire.
I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.
First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.
Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.
To understand someone, find out how he spends his money.
Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.
Consciousness is our only reprieve from Time.
The time I kill is killing me.
The man in the street is always a stranger.
Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.
Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
The higher the moral tone, the more suspect the speaker.
The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.
The ravaged face in the mirror hides the enchanting youth that is the real me.
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.
The beloved is the ultimate fetish.
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort.
An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie.
If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.
General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others.
Talk about yourself as much as you like, but do not expect others to listen.
A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.
Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves.
My mind is led astray by every faint rustle.
At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.
Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.
A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.
Cruelty is softened by fear, not pity.
The real secrets are not the ones I tell.
When I prayed for success, I forgot to ask for sound sleep and good digestion.
As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.
Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.
Never ask a bore a question.
Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame.
Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.
City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.
Documents create a paper reality we call proof.
There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.
In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners.
Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.
The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.
Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.
Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.
Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.
If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.
In every death, a busy world comes to an end.
To be successful be ahead of your time, but only a little.
Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.
Complainers change their complaints, but they never reduce the amount of time spent in complaining.
Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.
Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.
Innocence: I am only stepping on your face because it lies in my path.
Most of my decisions in life seem absent-minded but inevitable.
Supermarkets depict abundance; boutiques exclusiveness; roadside stands authenticity.
An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.
Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists.
There is a line between a definite maybe and an indefinite yes.
The aftermath of joy is not usually more joy.
Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.
Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.
Even cats grow lonely and anxious.
The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.
Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids.
Children now expect their parents to audition for approval.
Few artists can afford artistic temperament.
Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here?
Victory brings obliviousness; defeat, attentiveness.
The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.
Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.
We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled.
A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does.
In adding up her assets, the ambitious lady calculated the worth of her beautiful body as coldly as everything else.
Three meals plus bedtime make four sure blessings a day.
Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'
An insult angers me. Being ignored crushes me.
Seeing my malevolent face in the mirror, my benevolent soul shrinks back.
Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind.
A blocked path also offers guidance.
When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.
I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else.
Nothing is more cheerful than talking about our friends' shortcomings.
I am forbidden sugar, fat, and alcohol. So hooray, I guess, for oatmeal, lemon juice, and chicken soup.
Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera.
People are reluctant to cite boredom as grounds for divorce.
As every cockroach knows, thriving on poisons is the secret of success.
Sentimentality is the respect the cold-hearted pay to feeling.
Complainers detest each other.

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