George Herbert Mead quotes

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member. (George Herbert Mead)
Society is unity in diversity.
George Herbert Mead
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
George Herbert Mead
In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves.
George Herbert Mead
Man lives in a world of meaning.
George Herbert Mead
What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.
George Herbert Mead
To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.
George Herbert Mead
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
George Herbert Mead
The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.
George Herbert Mead
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.
George Herbert Mead
Our cautious ancestors, when yawning, blocked the way to the entrance of evil spirits by putting their hands before their mouths. We find a reason for the gesture in the delicacy of manner which forbids an indecent exposure. (George Herbert Mead)
To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.
George Herbert Mead
Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.
George Herbert Mead
Physical things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act... It is in the operation with these perceptual or physical things which lie within the physiological act short of consummation that the peculiar human intelligence is found.
George Herbert Mead
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.
George Herbert Mead
Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle.
George Herbert Mead
The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends.
George Herbert Mead
The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.
George Herbert Mead
A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.
George Herbert Mead
The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.
George Herbert Mead
Warfare is an utterly stupid method of settling differences of interest between different nations. (George Herbert Mead)
Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.
George Herbert Mead