Top 62 Charles Horton Cooley Quotes
#1. If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
#2. When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
Charles Horton Cooley
#3. The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
Charles Horton Cooley
#5. The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
Charles Horton Cooley
#6. The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely.
Charles Horton Cooley
#7. I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
Charles Horton Cooley
#8. Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
Charles Horton Cooley
#10. It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general.
Charles Horton Cooley
#11. Freedom is the opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience.
Charles Horton Cooley
#13. Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
Charles Horton Cooley
#14. To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.
Charles Horton Cooley
#15. I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
#16. The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that some one or some class is not getting a fair chance.
Charles Horton Cooley
#17. Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.
Charles Horton Cooley
#18. As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
Charles Horton Cooley
#19. A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.
Charles Horton Cooley
#20. To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
Charles Horton Cooley
#21. A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley
#22. The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.
Charles Horton Cooley
#23. We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
Charles Horton Cooley
#24. Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Charles Horton Cooley
#25. The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
Charles Horton Cooley
#26. Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
#28. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.
Charles Horton Cooley
#29. Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Charles Horton Cooley
#30. Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Charles Horton Cooley
#31. The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
Charles Horton Cooley
#32. To desire to be an artist is to desire to be a complete man in respect to some one function, to realize yourself utterly. A man is a poor thing who is content not to be an artist.
Charles Horton Cooley
#33. By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
Charles Horton Cooley
#34. To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
Charles Horton Cooley
#35. The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Horton Cooley
#36. No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.
Charles Horton Cooley
#37. Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
Charles Horton Cooley
#38. So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.
Charles Horton Cooley
#39. There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
Charles Horton Cooley
#40. The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
Charles Horton Cooley
#41. One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
Charles Horton Cooley
#42. If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.
Charles Horton Cooley
#43. A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail ... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Charles Horton Cooley
#44. We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.
Charles Horton Cooley
#46. Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
Charles Horton Cooley
#47. Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
#48. A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.
Charles Horton Cooley
#49. The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Charles Horton Cooley
#50. A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
Charles Horton Cooley
#51. When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize
any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.
Charles Horton Cooley
#52. Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.
Charles Horton Cooley
#53. If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
Charles Horton Cooley
#55. The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.
Charles Horton Cooley
#56. There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to 'Americanize' him.
Charles Horton Cooley
#57. Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
Charles Horton Cooley
#58. It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.
Charles Horton Cooley
#59. There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
Charles Horton Cooley
#60. To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
Charles Horton Cooley
#61. One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
Charles Horton Cooley
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