Charles Horton Cooley Mean Quotations

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.

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.

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.