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.

The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.

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.

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

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.

The bashful are always aggressive at heart.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

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

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

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.