Mason Cooley

The chair as ideas fits only the bottom as idea.

— Mason Cooley

Failures are easier to repeat than successes.

— Mason Cooley

As I review my life, I feel I must have missed the point, either then or now.

— Mason Cooley

Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Eccentricity: strength of character doubling back on itself.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Working cuts down on both folly and wisdom.

— Mason Cooley

Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports.

— Mason Cooley

Neat trick: to be roused to ambition and reconciled to one's mediocrity at the same time.

— Mason Cooley

Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.

— Mason Cooley

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

— Mason Cooley

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen: even less, the trouble I've successfully avoided.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.

— Mason Cooley

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

— Mason Cooley

To a suicide: You just poisoned the wrong person.

— Mason Cooley

Many think that assigning blame settles matters.

— Mason Cooley

Forget what hurt you but never forget what it thaught you.

— Mason Cooley

When sages commend excess, Desire is sick.

— Mason Cooley

Now that I see you understand me so well, I will avoid you.

— Mason Cooley

Many count on their disadvantages to cover for them.

— Mason Cooley

Self-pity dries up our sympathy for others.

— Mason Cooley

If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Beggars beg to get money, not to reproach the passerby.

— Mason Cooley

Aphorisms are not true or false, but pointed or flat.

— Mason Cooley

Explanations comfort us by giving the impression that there is an order in things.

— Mason Cooley

Self-blame usually has an undertone of self-congratulation.

— Mason Cooley

Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred.

— Mason Cooley

The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth.

— Mason Cooley

Some subjects come up suddenly in our speech and cannot be silenced.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Dreams are distorted representations of desire. So are dream- analyses.

— Mason Cooley

The cow's point of view deserves more literary attention.

— Mason Cooley

Sentimentality is the respect the cold-hearted pay to feeling.

— Mason Cooley

Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.

— Mason Cooley

An event is not over until everyone is tired of talking about it.

— Mason Cooley

As children, our protests availed little. As adults, the same.

— Mason Cooley

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

— Mason Cooley