Mason Cooley Quotes

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

I reject all evidence that my fabulous beloved is an ordinary person who worries, watches TV, and has bouts of indigestion.

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

Expenditure now attracts fame as conquest once did.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned.

Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.

Small faults and virtues are for daily life. The big ones are for emergencies.

The life of pleasure breeds boredom. The life of duty breeds resentment.

We do justice coldly, injustice hotly.

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

As a comforter, philosophy cannot compete with a good dinner.

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

The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental.

I can imagine many things, but few clearly.

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

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

The body has a mind of its own.

Self-reform is the only kind that works.

Thoughts can be revised. Deeds cannot.

Looking backward at what has been lost, I feel sad, then indifferent, and at last relieved.

God improvises. Man systematizes.

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

Travelling, I worry about luggage, prices, and strange food. At home, I am free to broaden my mind by thinking about the higher things.

Sincerity guarantees nothing but itself.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.

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

No use saying necessity is making a mistake.

God may be a human creation, but He goes His way, not ours.

I know God exits, but I don't know where.

A: Everything changes. B: But not enough.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

The tranquility of my room partakes too much of Forest Lawn.

A quiet fool can go undiscovered for a long time.

Civilization creates discontents; barbarism creates quick endings.

Some crave grief like strong drink.

My reluctant charity shames both me and the recipient.

Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief.

Pain pays no attention to moans or excuses.

Hope likes justification, but can do without.

Yawns are hard to refute.

Undecidability is a useful category even in dealing with restaurant menus.

I do not remember joy or sorrow in childhood, but listening for clues.

Laughter and tears may not persuade, but they cannot be refuted.

Eccentricity is originality that leads nowhere.

Alzheimer's usually comes later than AIDS, but I decline to call that progress.

Life is used up all the same, whether we save, spend, or waste it.

Regretting the past does not prevent me from repeating it.

Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.