Charles Horton Cooley

So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted…

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for…

— Charles Horton Cooley

I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as…

— Charles Horton Cooley

“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think…

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a…

— Charles Horton Cooley

Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society,…

— Charles Horton Cooley

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he…

— Charles Horton Cooley

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the…

— Charles Horton Cooley

In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and…

— Charles Horton Cooley

To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

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

The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair…

— Charles Horton Cooley

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand…

— Charles Horton Cooley

One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For…

— Charles Horton Cooley

If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the…

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

— Charles Horton Cooley

As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in…

— Charles Horton Cooley

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him,…

— Charles Horton Cooley

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency,…

— Charles Horton Cooley

A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.

— Charles Horton Cooley

When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility,…

— Charles Horton Cooley

We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross…

— Charles Horton Cooley