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.
Category Archive: Charles Horton Cooley
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.
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.
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
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.
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.
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.