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
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
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
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Imagination
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
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Freedom
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley
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
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
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Talent
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Society
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
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
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, Writing, Writers
The idealist’s program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
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
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
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Criticism
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
The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: The Mind
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
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
—Charles 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 Cooley
Topics: People
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
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Failures, Failure, Mistakes
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
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
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
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
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: Reading, Books
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 Cooley
Topics: Madness
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
—Charles Cooley
Topics: Belief, Faith
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
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
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
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
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
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
—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 bashful are always aggressive at heart.
—Charles Cooley
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