Faith & Spirit Quote by Mason Cooley

Success, Cooley reminds us, is the kind of wish that arrives with fine print. The line is built like a confession, but it’s really a miniature indictment of the culture of striving: we learn to petition for big, legible prizes and neglect the unglamorous systems that make a life livable. “Prayed” tilts the sentence toward humility and ritual, as if ambition has become its own religion. Then the punch lands in the body: “sound sleep and good digestion,” the plainest metrics of well-being, the stuff you notice only when it’s gone.

The intent is slyly corrective. Cooley doesn’t moralize against wanting success; he exposes how success-talk edits out the costs. By framing the omission as an “I forgot,” he captures a psychological truth about ambition: it narrows attention. You don’t merely chase the promotion or the book deal; you start bargaining away the quiet, restorative parts of yourself without admitting you’re making a trade.

The subtext is almost medical: anxiety, insomnia, ulcers, the nervous system taking the brunt of “achievement.” It’s also social satire. In a culture that rewards visible output, sleep and digestion read like embarrassingly small asks, too private to count as aspirations. Cooley, an aphorist attuned to American restlessness, compresses a whole era’s stress economics into one dry sentence: we pray to win, then act surprised when our bodies stop cooperating.