Quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton 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 Horton 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 Horton 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 Horton Cooley

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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 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.

Charles Horton 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 Horton 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.

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton 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 Horton Cooley

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

Charles Horton Cooley

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