Quotes from Charles Horton Cooley

The bashful are always aggressive at heart.

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

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.

Freedom is the opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience.

Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.