Mason Cooley Quotes

Teenagers only have to focus on themselves - its not until we get older that we realize that other people exist.

I was deaf and dumb and blind to all but me, myself and I.

Most of us are consumed with our own thoughts and desires and are not always thinking about what other people may want. This is not necessarily being egocentric; it is just being human.

People are really exercised about one particular thing, and that is themselves. They will bore you endlessly with their broken hearts.

I never really look at other people; I just worry about myself.

Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.

Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.

Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.

All pity is self-pity.

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.

You’re a human, you should understand self-obsession.

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you and what people think of you.

He who lives only for himself is truly dead to others.

Some things I never learned to like. I didn't like to kiss babies, though I didn't mind kissing their mothers.

Self-pity dries up our sympathy for others.

When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.

At times ... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.

I never want to end up being a self-centered, vain human being.

PERSONAL IMPORTANCE or taking things personally, is an expression of SELFISHNESS because we make the assumption that everything is about ME!! NOTHING PEOPLE DO IS BECAUSE OF YOU!! IT'S BECAUSE OF THEMSELVES!!

That love of self, which the world advocates, is a thousand times more dangerous than any poison.

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

A play presents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It's an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask 'Am I like that?'

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me.

Sometimes when we forget to do things for others, it's because we're too wrapped up in our own problems.