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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
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

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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 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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There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
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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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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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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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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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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
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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
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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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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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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 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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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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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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The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.
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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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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The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
Charles Horton Cooley
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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