Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) was an American social psychologist, sociologist, and educator. An important social theorist of the early twentieth century, he is famous for his sociopsychological approach to the understanding of society.
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cooley earned his B.A. and his doctorate at Michigan in 1894. He started teaching at the university in 1892, becoming a full professor of sociology in 1907 and remained there until the end of his life.
Based on the work of philosopher William James, Cooley developed the concept of the reflected or “looking glass self” and established that an individual’s personality emerges from social influences and that the individual and the group are complementary aspects of human association.
In his trilogy, Human Nature and the Social Order (1902,) Social Organization (1909,) and Social Process (1918,) Cooley wrote eloquently of the evolution of the self and on the social origins of both the mind and the self.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Cooley
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
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
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
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
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
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: Heroism, Heroes, Aspirations, Heroes/Heroism
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
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Admiration
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
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Prudence
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 Cooley
Topics: Society
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Faith, Belief
The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
—Charles Cooley
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Failures, Mistakes, Failure
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: The Artist
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: Egotism, Ego
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 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 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 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
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 Cooley
Topics: Disability
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
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: Tourism, Travel
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Worth
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 Cooley
The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: The Mind, Mind
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 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 Cooley
Topics: Books, Reading
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
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