Mason Cooley People Quotations

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.

Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.

City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.

Why do we never expect dull people to be rascals?

People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.

People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.

Holding unconventional opinions makes people feel they have strong characters.

Inconsistency has been overpraised by people who do not expect to suffer from it.

Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine.

Listening to people keeps them entertained.

People who expect deference resent mere civility.

Lonely people keep up a ceaseless flow of commentary on themselves.

When a modest man praises himself, people listen.

Prudence does not make people happy; it merely deprives them of the excitement of being constantly in trouble.

The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.

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

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

Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.

Most people regard getting their way as a matter of simple justice.

Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics.

Sexual attraction pairs people, but does not match them.

People may show jealousy, but hide their envy.

Most people find just being themselves not enough of a show.

Listen to what people say about themselves; they will tell you everything you need to know.

Beautiful people are forgiven more often than the rest.

Since we hate the same people, we should be friends.

The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning.

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

Good books do not make people wiser or happier--only more conscious.

People often are unsure whether or not they are in love, but they generally know whether or not they are having sex.

The past goes right on pulling me apart, though I can scarcely remember the people or the issues.

People invent gods to explain their suffering.

The trouble with the young people today is that it is they who are young.

The more powerless people are, the longer they are kept waiting.

Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves?

People are not the way they are primarily in order to annoy me.

Gossip is dying out because fewer and fewer people care to talk about anything besides themselves.

People often imagine that being hard to please confers a certain superiority.

People are reluctant to cite boredom as grounds for divorce.

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

I am often attracted to people with whom I could not hold a five minute conversation.

People who behave at forty as they did at twenty must sometimes wonder why their charm is not working.

Self-pity makes people callous.