Clergyman's

A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.
- Charles Cooley

The distinctive thing in the idea for which the pronouns of the first person are names is apparently a characteristic kind of feeliing which may be called the my-feeling or sense of appropriation. Almost any sort of ideas may be associated with this feeling, and so come to be named ""I"" or ""mine,"" but the feeling, and that alone it would seem, is the determining factor in the matter. As Professor James says in his admirable discussion of the self, the words ""me"" and ""self"" designate ""all the things which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.
- Charles Cooley

Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process: and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book , I tried to see society as it exists in the social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining slightly in the background.
- Charles Cooley

How is a man to find where he belongs in life? The more original he is, the less likely is he to find his place prepared for him. He must not expect to see from the beginning what mould his life will take... The power to work on faith is what distinguishes great men.
- Charles Cooley

BY primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a ""we""; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which ""we"" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.
- Charles Cooley

Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives.
- Charles Cooley

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

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.
- Charles Cooley