Charles Horton Cooley quotes

" An artist cannot fail it is a success to be one. " # Arts and Artists

" Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also. " # Arts and Artists

" We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale -- identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual. " # Diversity # Books - Reading # Life and Living

" 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. " # Disability # Tact and Tactfulness # Philosophers and Philosophy

" In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable. " # Writers and Writing # Curiosity # Books - Reading

" Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect. " # Simplicity # Age and Aging # Tact and Tactfulness

" 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. " # Vacation # Change # Environment

" We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first. " # Action

" 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. " # Discipline # Freedom # Absence

" When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty. " # Duty # Death and Dying # Pain