The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than that which deludes itself with the notion that it… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
