Charles Cooley quotes - page 2

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 Cooley)
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
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. View quote
Charles Cooley
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God. View quote
Charles Cooley
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise. View quote
Charles Cooley
I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles Cooley
A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun. (Charles Cooley)
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition. View quote
Charles Cooley
A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol. View quote
Charles Cooley
Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago? View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles Cooley
BY primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling. View quote
Charles Cooley
As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. (Charles Cooley)
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles 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. View quote
Charles Cooley
We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first. View quote
Charles Cooley