Charles Cooley: Quotes about imagination

“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

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

Imagination , Game , Thinking

“A self -idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.”

Charles Cooley

Variant: A self -idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.
Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 182 (1922)

Feeling , Imagination , Idea , Appearance

“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.”

Charles Cooley

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

Imagination , Appearance

“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 259 (1964)

Pain , Feeling , Imagination , Communication

“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.”

Charles Cooley

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

Imagination , Personality