Best Quotes by Charles Horton Cooley (Top 10)
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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
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There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
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An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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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
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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
More Charles Horton Cooley Quotes
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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
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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
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Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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 Horton Cooley
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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
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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
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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
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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 Horton Cooley
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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
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We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
Charles Horton Cooley
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A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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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