Top 60 Charles Horton Cooley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

Featured in: Personality Quotes, Human Nature Quotes, Identity Quotes

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

— Charles Horton Cooley

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Charles Horton Cooley

6. “Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

7. “The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

8. “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

10. “Freedom is the opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

11. “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

12. “Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

13. “We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

14. “The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

15. “The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

16. “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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

17. “We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

18. “To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

19. “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 imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

20. “Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

21. “If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

22. “Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

23. “So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

24. “The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

25. “By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

26. “The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

27. “Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

28. “It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

29. “The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

30. “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

31. “The bashful are always aggressive at heart.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

32. “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

33. “Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

34. “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

35. “Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

36. “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

37. “We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

38. “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.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

39. “There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to “Americanize” him.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

40. “When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize – any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

Featured in: Strong Quotes

41. “There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

42. “The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

43. “Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

44. “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

45. “The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

— Charles Horton Cooley

47. “The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

48. “A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.”

— Charles Horton Cooley

49. “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

50. “There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.”

— Charles Horton Cooley