A Quote by Mason Cooley

Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating.

Mason Cooley

Quote Topics

Eating Impossible Less Living Only Slightly Than Vicarious

Quote Author

Mason Cooley
American - Writer
1927 - 2002

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

George Santayana

It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

George Santayana

However long the horror continued, one must not get to the stage of refusing to think about it. To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice. And whereas to conceal direct pain was a virtue, to conceal vicarious pain was a sin. Only by feeling it to the utmost, and by expressing it, could the rest of the world help to heal the injury which had caused it. Money, food, clothing, shelter - people could give all these and still it would not be enough; it would not absolve them from paying also, in full, the imponderable tribute of grief.

Jan Struther

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

Elon Musk

All action is vicarious faith.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is no such thing as vicarious experience.

Mary Parker Follett

History at its best is vicarious experience.

Edmund Morgan

The key to thrillers is vicarious pleasure.

Lee Child

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.

David Rakoff

In our world, we have this huge focus on vicarious living - politicians, movie stars, athletes, coaches, all these people. What our research has shown very clearly is that people who are really happier and have more meaningful lives are people that focus on living their own lives.

Marshall Goldsmith

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Richard Wright

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.