Charles Cooley Quotes (10 Quotes)

We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale -- identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.

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.

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.

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.

When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.

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.

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.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual there must be a competing idealism something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.

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.