A Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

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

Charles Horton Cooley

Quote Topics

Inner Inner Life Largely Life Life Is Literature Passions Record Self Social Struggle Very

Quote Author

Charles Horton Cooley
American - Sociologist
1866 - 1928

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

Adam Gopnik

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all. In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honor, he throws aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth having - he asks for nothing but bare life.

Gertrude Bell

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

Janet Frame

Revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle.

Joseph Stalin

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Italo Calvino

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

Aung San Suu Kyi

All writers are autobiographical to a degree and writing about the nature of their inner life. My inner life has always been a struggle between my conception of myself and the world versus reality.

Francis Levy

Once a person has taken their life, in the inner realms, the suicide will repeat automatically the feelings of despair and fear which preceded his self murder, and go through the act and the death struggle time after time with ghastly persistence... They remain conscious - often entangled in the final scene of the earth life for a very long time, unaware that they have lost the physical body.

Annie Besant

The very secret of life for mewas to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance.

Margaret Bourke-White

Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God.

Amit Ray

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most "obvious," "accurate," and "natural" style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.

Stephen Jay Gould

Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.

Andrzej Wajda

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.