Charles Horton Cooley

(342 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(267 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(237 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(163 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(157 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(151 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(137 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(119 votes)   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
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(118 votes)   ''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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(103 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(93 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(90 votes)   A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

Charles Horton Cooley
American, Sociologist Quotes

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(90 votes)   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
American, Sociologist Quotes

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(89 votes)   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 Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(86 votes)   We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

Charles Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website