Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
Charles Horton Cooley
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Charles Horton Cooley quotes
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
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.
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
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.
The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.
The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.
The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
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.
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
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.
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.
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.
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