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

Charles Horton Cooley

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Charles Horton Cooley
Age: 64 †
Born: 1864
Born: August 17
Died: 1929
Died: May 27
Economist
Sociologist
Ann Arbor
Michigan
Charles Horton Cooley
Struggle
Inordinate
Passion
Diaries
Literature
Journal
Social
Largely
Self
Passions
Life
Inner
Record
Records

More quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

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I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
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We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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 Horton Cooley
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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
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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
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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
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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 Horton Cooley
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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
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No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.
Charles Horton Cooley
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One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
Charles Horton Cooley
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A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley