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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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Charles Horton Cooley
Age: 64 †
Born: 1864
Born: August 17
Died: 1929
Died: May 27
Economist
Sociologist
Ann Arbor
Michigan
Charles Horton Cooley
Works
Rooted
Animal
Lower
Seems
Deeply
Degeneracy
Doe
Destroy
Kindliness
Mind
Instinct
Sinks
Mental
Idiocy
Kindness
Primarily
Exist
Grades

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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
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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.
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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.
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Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
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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.
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