Charles Cooley quotes

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 Cooley)
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
The bashful are always aggressive at heart. View quote
Charles Cooley
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. View quote
Charles Cooley
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point. (Charles Cooley)
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society. View quote
Charles Cooley
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. View quote
Charles Cooley
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles. (Charles Cooley)
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time. View quote
Charles Cooley
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration. View quote
Charles Cooley