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

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

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

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
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

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

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

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.
Charles Horton Cooley

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.
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