Quotes from Mason Cooley

Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger.

Sensuality takes planning and work.

Grandiosity lessens as work proceeds.

Worrying is as futile as boredom, but harder work.

Working cuts down on both folly and wisdom.

I am invigorated by work, wasted by pleasure.

Nothing easier than to confuse busyness with goodness.

Work at first rescues us, then ravages us.

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

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

Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

An insult angers me. Being ignored crushes me.

After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology.

Art chooses its constraints.

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art.

Art can make chaos seductive.

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you.

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