Charles Cooley Quotes

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

To many people it would seem mystical to say the persons, as we know them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a verifiable and not very abstruse fact.

Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives.

"SOCIETY and the Individual" is really the subject of this whole book, and not merely of Chapter One. It is my general aim to set forth, from various points of view, what the individual is, considered as a member of a social whole ; while the special purpose of this chapter is only to offer a preliminary statement of the matter, as I conceive it, afterward to be unfolded at some length and variously illustrated.

A self -idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.

If failure or disgrace arrives, if one suddenly finds that the faces of men show coldness or contempt instead of the kindliness and deference that he is used to, he will perceive from the shock, the fear, the sense of being outcast and helpless, that he was living in the minds of others without knowing it, just as we daily walk the solid ground without thinking how it bears us up.

The unhappiness of men, maintained by Socrates, depends upon their badness being brought home to them in conscience. If, because of their insensibility or lack of proper reproof, the error of their way is not impressed upon them, they have no motive to reform. The fact that the evil-doer has become such gradually, and does not realize the evil in him, is no reason why we should not blame him; it is the function of blame to make him and others realize it, to define evil-doer when he is dead, or has sincerely and openly repented, not while he remains a force for wrong.

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.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

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.

Virtue is a system and men do heroic acts as part of the day's work and without self-consciousness.

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.

The group self or "we" is simply an "I" which includes other persons. One identifies himself with a group and speaks of the common will, opinion, service, or the like in terms of "we" and "us." The sense of it is stimulated by co-operation within and opposition without.

As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.

A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.