One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
Category Archive: Charles Horton Cooley
The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail… Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
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.
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.
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.