90 Quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.

To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

To many people it would seem mystical to say the persons, as we know them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a verifiable and not very abstruse fact.

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.

The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to “Americanize” him.

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.

Institutions – government, churches, industries, and the like – have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to 'Americanize' him.