Mason Cooley

In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners.

— Mason Cooley

I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.

— Mason Cooley

To make a thought my own, I must think it often.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

I am kept in bondage by the moles of my beloved.

— Mason Cooley

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

— Mason Cooley

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.

— Mason Cooley

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.

— Mason Cooley

Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?

— Mason Cooley

Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.

— Mason Cooley

Those who follow where their genitals lead them often wind up in tedious company.

— Mason Cooley

Satire is born of the cities it denounces.

— Mason Cooley

Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can.

— Mason Cooley

Fail, and your friends feel superior. Succeed, and they feel resentful.

— Mason Cooley

Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment.

— Mason Cooley

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

— Mason Cooley

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

— Mason Cooley

Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.

— Mason Cooley

The price of telling your troubles is having to listen to advice.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion...

— Mason Cooley

I am open-minded on all questions I care nothing about.

— Mason Cooley

Rules that are never violated cease to be recognized as Rules.

— Mason Cooley

No matter how close thought sticks to the actual, it follows its own rules.

— Mason Cooley

Either offer me something I really like, or stop trying to tempt me.

— Mason Cooley

Promiscuity: optimism, free enterprise, mobility--the American Dream.

— Mason Cooley

The unhappy are prisoners of a single round of thought.

— Mason Cooley

Sleaze is a point by point refutation of elegance.

— Mason Cooley

The young have stolen our youthfulness, and flaunt it without shame.

— Mason Cooley

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

— Mason Cooley

Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos.

— Mason Cooley

Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.

— Mason Cooley

The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow.

— Mason Cooley

Cheerfulness is a policy; happiness is a talent.

— Mason Cooley

Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

The perfect aphorism would achieve classical balance and then immediately upset it.

— Mason Cooley

When love ends, the beloved is no longer standing on a pedestal, but in a hole.

— Mason Cooley

Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle.

— Mason Cooley

Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids.

— Mason Cooley