Best Quotes by Charles Horton Cooley (Top 10)

  1. 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.
  2. There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
  3. One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
  4. Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
  5. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
  6. 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.
  7. The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

More Charles Horton Cooley Quotes