Frasi di Charles Horton Cooley

„La pagina stampata è la porta attraverso la quale un individuo entra, al giorno d'oggi, nelle stanze più ampie della vita.“

La comunicazione

„La parola è un veicolo, una nave che scende dal passato carica del pensiero di uomini che non abbiamo mai visto.“

La comunicazione

„La scrittura ha reso possibile la storia e l'uomo della storia con le sue complesse istituzioni.“

La comunicazione

„Non c'è una linea netta che divida i mezzi di comunicazione dal resto del mondo esterno.“

La comunicazione

„Quasi ogni bambino comincia ad inventare un linguaggio per sé, e cessa di usarlo soltanto quando scopre che ne esiste uno già pronto per lui.“

La comunicazione

„Quasi ogni cosa può essere usata come segno.“

La comunicazione

„Senza la comunicazione lo spirito non sviluppa una vera natura umana, ma rimane ad uno stadio anormale ed indefinito.“

La comunicazione

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

La comunicazione

„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 (Human Nature and Social Order), 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.“

Origine: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 36

„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.“

Origine: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. vii, Preface , lead sentece

„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 Horton Cooley, in Structure and Agency in Everyday Life: An Introduction to Social Psychology http://books.google.co.in/books?id=KMLEnR1hoDQC&pg=PA53, (1 January 2003), p. 53

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

Origine: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 168-9

„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.“

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

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

„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.“

Origine: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 111

„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.“

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

„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.“

Origine: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. 23 (1962)

„"SOCIETY and the Individual" is really the subject of this whole book, and not merely of Chapter One. It is my general aim to set forth, from various points of view, what the individual is, considered as a member of a social whole; while the special purpose of this chapter is only to offer a preliminary statement of the matter, as I conceive it, afterward to be unfolded at some length and variously illustrated.“

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