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.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Relying too much on others' opinions can undermine your self-confidence and peace of mind.
This quote by Charles Horton Cooley emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and the dangers of depending on external validation. When you allow others' views of you to dictate your self-worth, you risk giving away your sense of inner peace and stability, leading to uncertainties and anxiety about how you are perceived.
Themes
Self-WorthValidationInner PeaceConfidenceSelf-AcceptanceAnxiety
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about self-acceptance.
More from Charles Horton Cooley
All quotes →If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
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.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
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The wisest of the wise may err.
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From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.
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Instead of 'watching the thinker,' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
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