Quote#World
Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I…
Quote byCharles Cooley · 1864–1929
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Charles Cooley (1927). Life and the Student: Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society, and Letters. p. 200.
English (original)
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
More from Charles Cooley
To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
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.
A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.
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 …
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives.