Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

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

— Charles Horton Cooley

“The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“The bashful are always aggressive at heart.”

— Charles Horton 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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

— Charles Horton 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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

— Charles Horton 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.”

— Charles Horton 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.”

— Charles Horton 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.

— Charles Horton 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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“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

“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

“Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

“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

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

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

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

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.

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

“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

“Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“The actual God of many Americans ... is simply the current of American life.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

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.

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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

“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

“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