Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

By bringing shame to a person, how could one expect to make him a better man?

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.

The time will come when it will disgust you to look in the mirror.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

I don't spend a lot of time in the mirror.

Shame doesn't exist as an emotion without the projected or perceived sense of judgment coming from somewhere else.

Body image has a lot to do with where you're coming from personally.

What people don't understand is that when I hear what somebody has said about me, I wonder, 'Don't you know what they are saying about you, too?' It's quite amusing.

I usually do drive-by insults, and keep moving until I realize the next day how horrible I am.

One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity.

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.

If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.

There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.

I don't talk about these things if I haven't lived them, and I've hurt people in my life. It's something I still have to think about when I sleep at night.

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.

Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.

I don't have all that great an awareness of how people see me in life. I don't find myself thinking about it a lot.

Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable — this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine?