Charles Horton Cooley Quotes (40 Quotes)


    A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.

    Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.

    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.

    The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

    Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.


    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.


    Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago.

    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.

    ''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.

    Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

    Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

    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.



    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.

    There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

    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.

    There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.

    Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoirfaire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.

    The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

    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.


    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other.

    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.


    The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

    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.

    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 . .

    One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

    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.

    Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

    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.

    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.


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