There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.

- Charles Horton Cooley

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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.

- 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.

- Charles Horton Cooley

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

- Charles Horton Cooley

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

- Charles Horton Cooley

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

- Charles Horton Cooley

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

- Charles Horton Cooley

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

- Charles Horton Cooley

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

- Charles Horton Cooley

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

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.

- Charles Horton Cooley

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

- Charles Horton Cooley