Charles Cooley: Mind

Charles Cooley was American sociologist. Explore interesting quotes on mind.

Charles Cooley: 34 quotes0 likes

“The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.”

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 17

“Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.”

Charles Cooley (1927). Life and the Student: Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society, and Letters. p. 200

“As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.”

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 182 (1922)

“If failure or disgrace arrives, if one suddenly finds that the faces of men show coldness or contempt instead of the kindliness and deference that he is used to, he will perceive from the shock, the fear, the sense of being outcast and helpless, that he was living in the minds of others without knowing it, just as we daily walk the solid ground without thinking how it bears us up.”

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 207

“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. A man will boast to one person of an action — say some sharp transaction in trade-^which he would be ashamed to own to another.”

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 184-5 (1922)