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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

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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
Person
Word
Resisted
Look
Purpose
Exert
Looks
Understand
Altogether
Way
Cannot
Symbol
Make
Thought
Understands
Power
Definite
Character
Symbols
Persons
Sure
Comprehends

More quotes by 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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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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Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
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 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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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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To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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
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To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
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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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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Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
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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The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
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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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
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The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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 Horton Cooley
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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