Charles Cooley quotes

Charles Cooley was an American sociologist, best known for introducing the concept of the "looking-glass self." His work focused on the relationship between individuals and society, emphasizing the importance of social interaction in the formation of self-identity. He influenced generations of social scientists and helped shape modern sociology. Here are 75 of his quotes:

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 Cooley

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

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.

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.

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.

Charles Cooley

The bashful are always aggressive at heart.

Charles Cooley

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

Charles Cooley

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

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.

Charles Cooley

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

Charles Cooley

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

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.

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.

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.

Charles Cooley

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

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.

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.

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.

Charles Cooley

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

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.

Charles Cooley

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

Charles Cooley

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

Charles Cooley