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
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 Cooley
Topics: Simplicity
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Belief, Faith
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Worth
We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.
—Charles Cooley
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
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Freedom
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
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 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 Cooley
Topics: Duty
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
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Society
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
In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Ambition
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: The Artist
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: Experts, Professionalism
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
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Failure, Mistakes, Failures
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 Cooley
Topics: Ego, Egotism
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: Judges, Judgment, Judging
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
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
A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Purpose
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Admiration
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 imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Imagination
The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
—Charles Cooley
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Career
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- 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
- Theodore Roethke American Poet
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