Quotes from Charles Horton 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.

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

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

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

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

A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius, which is apt to be perturbable and to wear itself out before fruition.

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.

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.

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

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.

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

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

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.

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.

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.