Charles Cooley - Mind Quotes

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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 Cooley
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.

Charles Cooley
We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.

Charles Cooley
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.

Charles Cooley
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.

Charles Cooley
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 Cooley
Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.

Charles Cooley
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 Cooley
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. A man will boast to one person of an action — say some sharp transaction in trade - which he would be ashamed to own to another.

Charles Cooley
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

Charles Cooley
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 Cooley
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 Cooley
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 Cooley
If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.

Charles Cooley
Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

Charles Cooley
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 Cooley