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.Collection: Imagination
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.Collection: Art
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Travel
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.Collection: Freedom
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.Collection: Failure
The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.Collection: Moving
Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.Collection: Thinking
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.Collection: People
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.Collection: Thinking
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.Collection: Way
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.Collection: Hero
As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.Collection: Eye
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.Collection: Aggravation
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.Collection: Self
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.Collection: Dark
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Issues
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.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Freedom
We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.Collection: Acting
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Men
We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Life
There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than that which deludes itself with the notion that it is not a self at all, but something else. It is well to beware of persons who believe that the cause, the mission, the philanthropy, the hero, or whatever it may be that they strive for, is outside of themselves, so that they feel a certain irresponsibility, and are likely to do things which they would recognize as wrong if done in behalf of an acknowledged self.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Pain
A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.Collection: Cat
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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Men
It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.Collection: Greed
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.Collection: Mean
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.Collection: Reflection
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.Collection: Cells
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.Collection: Lying
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.Collection: Life
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.Collection: Genius
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Political
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Nature
Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.Collection: Kindness
The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.Collection: Currents
When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize -- any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Character
Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.Collection: Doubt
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Blow