Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Charles Cooley (American Sociologist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Prudence

Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Failures, Failure, Mistakes

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

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Cooley
Topics: The Artist

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 mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Mind, The Mind

There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Worth

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 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

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: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes, Aspirations, Heroism

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Society

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Admiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Face, Faces

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

A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Talent

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Cooley
Topics: Imagination

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