Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.

Charles Horton Cooley

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 Horton 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 Horton Cooley

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 Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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 Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

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 Horton 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 Horton 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 Horton 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 Horton 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 Horton Cooley

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 Horton 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 Horton Cooley