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Action(s)
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We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Admiration
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To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Ambition
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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
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Artist, The
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An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
-Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student
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Authors & Writing
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In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Career, Vocation
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There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Class
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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
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Competition
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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
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Conflict
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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, Life and the Student
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Criticism
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One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
-Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student
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Disability, Handicaps
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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
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Discipline
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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
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Diversity
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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
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Duty
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When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Ego
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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.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Face, Faces
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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
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Freedom
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Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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Heroes/Heroism
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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
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Hypocrisy
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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 Horton Cooley
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Idealism
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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
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Imagination
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The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Immigration
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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
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Individuality
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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.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Judging, Judgment
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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
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Books by and about Charles Horton Cooley