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.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Peace often seems the one thing fair and desirable, so that the cloister or the forest, or the vessel on the lonesome sea, is the most grateful object of imagination.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
A picture is made up of so many square inches of painted canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves but existing to the observor on account of the limits of his perception. A complete view of society would also be a complete view of all the individuals, and _vice versa;_ there would be no difference between them.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
To desire to be an artist is to desire to be a complete man in respect to some one function, to realize yourself utterly. A man is a poor thing who is content not to be an artist.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Life and the Student
As connected with the thought of other persons the self idea is always a consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one's life, because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one's own tendencies and at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which the general plan of life seems to require.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius, which is apt to be perturbable and to wear itself out before fruition.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Life and the Student
There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than that which deludes itself with the notion that it is not a self at all, but something else. It is well to beware of persons who believe that the cause, the mission, the philanthropy, the hero, or whatever it may be that they strive for, is outside of themselves, so that they feel a certain irresponsibility, and are likely to do things which they would recognize as wrong if done in behalf of an acknowledged self.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Life and the Student
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
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.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
An artist cannot fail; it is success to be one.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Life and the Student
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Institutions — government, churches, industries, and the like — have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom ; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that some one or some class is not getting a fair chance.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
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