A Quote by Mason Cooley

The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually.

Mason Cooley

Quote Topics

Building Burning Cannot Gradually Jump Limits Out Prudence

Quote Author

Mason Cooley
American - Writer
1927 - 2002

A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.

Max Lucado

If you put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump straight out. If you put it in cold water and gradually bring it to the boil, it'll sit right there until it dies. Scotland has been sitting in England's gradually boiling water for so long that many people are used to it.

John Niven

Do not believe that living together before marriage guarantees the future. By burning certain stages, you risk burning love itself. Time needs to be respected gradually, just like the expressions of love.

Pope Benedict XVI

The most important thing is practice in daily life; then you can know gradually the true value of religion. Doctrine is not meant for mere knowledge, but for the improvement of our minds. In order to do that, it must be part of our life. If you put religious doctrine in a building and when you leave the building depart from the practices, you cannot gain its value.

Dalai Lama

Of course building a kitchen makes all the symmetric sense in the world because everybody's burning calories at 120 beats a minute. You could even register it on a graph at the DJ booth. "How fast are they burning calories, sir?" "126 a minute." "Are you sure?" "Oh, I'm very sure." You can meter that out.

David Lee Roth

If he full-out flexed, I would probably faint, or jump off the building.

Ilona Andrews

Wow. What'd he do to deserve that? Rescue orphans from a burning building? If so, you might want to make sure he didn't set the building on fire in the first place.

Richelle Mead

If you really want to find out what you're capable of, you cannot put limits on yourself, and you definitely cannot be cautious.

John Eliot

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

Robert J. Sawyer

If I want to do action, you don't really get to do it. They don't let you, there's too much on the line to let you jump out of a building.

Channing Tatum

I don't think much of a dance step where the girl looks like she was being carried out of a burning building.

Frank Hubbard

I'm a feminist. God, yes! A bra-burning, building-burning feminist.

Romola Garai

The batteries are gradually becoming charged, and if the prudence of the government does not provide an outlet for the currents that are accumulating, some day the spark will be generated.