An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: The Artist
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Power
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 Cooley
Topics: Hypocrisy
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 Cooley
Topics: Individuality
One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
—Charles Cooley
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 Cooley
Topics: Sex
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Belief, Faith
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Failures, Failure, Mistakes
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 Cooley
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Society
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 Cooley
Topics: Freedom
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 Cooley
Topics: Faces, Face
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 Cooley
Topics: Psychiatry
The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
—Charles 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 Cooley
Topics: Class
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 Cooley
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Freedom
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 Cooley
Topics: Competition
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 Cooley
Topics: Discipline
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 Cooley
Topics: Praise
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 Cooley
Topics: People
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 Cooley
Topics: Conflict
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 Cooley
Topics: Professionalism, Experts
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Action
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Worth
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 Cooley
Topics: Judgment, Judging, Judges
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 Cooley
Topics: Aspirations, Heroes, Heroes/Heroism, Heroism
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Imagination
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Admiration
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh … to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Decisions
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot American Sociologist
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
- Harriet Martineau English Sociologist
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- W. E. B. Du Bois American Sociologist, Activist
- William James American Philosopher
- John Dewey American Philosopher
- Reinhold Niebuhr American Theologian
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