Charles Cooley Quotes

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

Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process: and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book (Human Nature and Social Order), I tried to see society as it exists in the social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining slightly in the background.

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.

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.

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.

The distinctive thing in the idea for which the pronouns of the first person are names is apparently a characteristic kind of feeliing which may be called the my-feeling or sense of appropriation. Almost any sort of ideas may be associated with this feeling, and so come to be named "I" or "mine," but the feeling, and that alone it would seem, is the determining factor in the matter. As Professor James says in his admirable discussion of the self, the words "me" and "self" designate "all the things which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort."

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.

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.

How is a man to find where he belongs in life? The more original he is, the less likely is he to find his place prepared for him. He must not expect to see from the beginning what mould his life will take... The power to work on faith is what distinguishes great men.

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

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

Sympathy is a requisite to social power. Only in so far as a man understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he any effective existence; the less he has of this the more he is a mere animal, not truly in contact with human life. And if he is not in contact with it he can of course have no power over it.

Every lover of books has authors whom he reads over and over again, whom he cares for as persons and not as sources of information, who are more to him, possibly, than any person he sees. He continually returns to the cherished companion and feeds eagerly upon his thought. It is because there is something in the book which he needs, which awakens and directs trains of thought that lead him where he likes to be led.

Yo sé, lo que lo creo que soy.
Yo sé lo que tú crees que yo soy.
Y yo soy lo que yo creo que tú crees que yo soy.

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.