Charles Horton Cooley

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

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. ”

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

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

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. ”

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture. ”

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. ”

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also. ”

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. ”

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. ”