Mason Cooley

A modest demeanor arouses thoughts of seduction.

— Mason Cooley

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

— Mason Cooley

When you feel protective toward your parents, you have become an adult.

— Mason Cooley

If there is no harm in asking, why guilt and fear when we do so?

— Mason Cooley

Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight.

— Mason Cooley

Your vanity and my vanity will never be friends.

— Mason Cooley

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

— Mason Cooley

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

— Mason Cooley

Secrets die when kept or revealed. They live by being faintly and uncertainly repeated.

— Mason Cooley

Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.

— Mason Cooley

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

— Mason Cooley

Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits.

— Mason Cooley

The magic of procedure: do this after that and thus before so; then your wish will be granted.

— Mason Cooley

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

— Mason Cooley

Many attempt to harvest what was never planted.

— Mason Cooley

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

— Mason Cooley

The man in the street is always a stranger.

— Mason Cooley

Sex is not imaginary, but it is not quite real either.

— Mason Cooley

Opportunity knocks, but doesn't always answer to its name.

— Mason Cooley

An old man drinks tea and reads the newspaper--forgetting age for a moment.

— Mason Cooley

Many who take up burdens come to resent being put upon.

— Mason Cooley

Alone, lonely people talk to themselves. In company, they often continue.

— Mason Cooley

Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life.

— Mason Cooley

“Reading gives us a place to go when we have no where to go”

— Mason Cooley

Most people see no reason to stop arguing just because an issue has been decided.

— Mason Cooley

Don't milk the cow too hard. She will kick you.

— Mason Cooley

Hope, and hopelessness, persist despite the facts.

— Mason Cooley

Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure.

— Mason Cooley

Ideologies can survive hostility, but not indifference.

— Mason Cooley

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

— Mason Cooley

The perfect pleasure: money is neither fattening nor immoral nor illegal.

— Mason Cooley

Sorrow also fulfills Desire. Example: the Soaps.

— Mason Cooley

An insult angers me. Being ignored crushes me.

— Mason Cooley

Eagerness to please attracts bullies and bores.

— Mason Cooley

In New York, one must collapse to be indolent.

— Mason Cooley

Modernized by tin roofs and T-shirts, Third World poverty is no longer picturesque.

— Mason Cooley

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

— Mason Cooley

Drunks do not have friends, but accomplices.

— Mason Cooley

Rule of science: only exclude purpose, and Nature will reveal her causes.

— Mason Cooley

Vacations prove that a life of pleasure is overrated.

— Mason Cooley