Quote: A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: 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. [Charles Horton Cooley]
Quote: Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect. [Charles Horton Cooley]