Quote

A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.

Charles Horton Cooley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Horton Cooley
Age: 64 †
Born: 1864
Born: August 17
Died: 1929
Died: May 27
Economist
Sociologist
Ann Arbor
Michigan
Charles Horton Cooley
Make
Thought
Understands
Power
Definite
Character
Symbols
Persons
Sure
Comprehends
Person
Word
Resisted
Look
Purpose
Exert
Looks
Understand
Altogether
Way
Cannot
Symbol

More quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
Charles Horton Cooley
Image
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
Image
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