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Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

“To desire to be an artist is to desire to be a complete man in respect to some one function, to realize yourself utterly. A man is a poor thing who is content not to be an artist.”

Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

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Charles Horton Cooley
Charles Horton Cooley

Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist born on August 17, 1864, and died on May 7, 1929. His research focused on social interaction and the relationship between individuals and society, particularly through his symbolic interaction theory to explore this field. Cooley's work had a profound impact on the development of sociological theory. more

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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. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.”

MindMeanSelfReasonUseFormIndividualHigherDisciplineFitConscienceConcernedAbsenceRationalSelf RespectPhasesDegradeUnfree
Book:Human Nature and the Social Order
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“Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.”

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Book:Two Major Works: Social Organization. Human Nature and the Social Order
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“If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane.”

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Book:Human Nature and the Social Order
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“There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than that which deludes itself with the notion that it is not a self at all, but something else. It is well to beware of persons who believe that the cause, the mission, the philanthropy, the hero, or whatever it may be that they strive for, is outside of themselves, so that they feel a certain irresponsibility, and are likely to do things which they would recognize as wrong if done in behalf of an acknowledged self.”

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Author:Charles Horton Cooley
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“It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.”

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Book:Human Nature and the Social Order
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“In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.”

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Book:Human Nature and the Social Order
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