Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

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

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.

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.

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

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.

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

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

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

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.

Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

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

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.

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

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

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.