Social atmosphere

“ But it is true not only that social life holds itself to great propriety, but that the moral atmosphere is uncommonly pure and wholesome. At the same time, the city does not lack gayety of movement, and it would not be called prudish, nor in some respects conventional. ”

“ It is an atmosphere from which living stimulating influences have been excluded, from which stimulating and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. ”

“ The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of some scope. ”

“ Your personal place may be at home. But the crowd, the need, is everywhere; at home, in the social circle, and among the men driven by the passion for business and for pleasure, in this dangerously prosperous land of ours. ”

“ The interactions which take place among the members of a community so constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal influences and public sentiment. ”

“ Could we all have abundant leisure and be sure to find our friends at home, what more agreeable business than visiting? To wander from one pleasant interior to another, to talk a little harmless gossip, to hear the last mot, the best piece of news, to see one's friends, their children, and the stranger within their gates—all this is charming; it is the Utopia of society ”

“ Society, the special field for the cultivation of manners, would soon be sterile soil were it not abandoned during lenten intervals and summers in the country. After meeting a multitude of people and being obliged to adjust ourselves to only such matters as all can understand, what a relief it is to be in the open fields, social conventions dropped, responsibilities forgotten, and no regard for others marking our words, acts, or dress! ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ Is it a community who even love to meet, and who really enjoy the social hours they spend together? Ask them in what mood or temper they enter upon the fatigues of the evening, or how often they wish that some event would occur to render their presence unnecessary. ”

“ The social environment acts through native impulses and speech and moral habitudes manifest themselves. There are specific good reasons for the usual attribution of acts to the person from whom they immediately proceed. ”

“ Country life as at present organized does not afford the best opportunity for the satisfaction of this social instinct. The great variety of social attractions [Pg 22] constitutes the lure of the city—it is the powerful social magnet. ”

“ We demand a system for having the streets of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air or atmosphere—and all the common conveniences for having decent and self-respecting souls in crowds—all the intelligence-machines, the love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of one another's lives! ”

“ There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. ”

“ The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail certain consequences. ”

“ It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it—the sphere of social contacts. ”

“ In the midst of a gentle rain, while those thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound about my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. ”

“ Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are trying to point out. ”

“ Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. ”

“ Uttering it, one is aware of the pleasant music of bustling streets, greetings in the market-place, whispered converse in the doorways, gay meetings and laughter, lighted squares and crowds, the touch of kind hands, evening meals and festivals, and all the reverberation of man's social voice. A man may grow sick for such scenes as a sailor grows sick with longing for the sea. ”

“ Perhaps you are responsible for the “socializing” of a very large group, most of the guests being strangers to each other, and you wish to break the ice and to get guests into the spirit that makes for easy and truly social conversation. ”

“ Thus industry and conscientiousness and public spirit, which are clearly affected by environment, show no greater resemblance than such practically unmodifiable traits as memory, original sensitiveness to colors, sounds, and distances. ”

“ Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or being the "sixth largest city." ”

“ Aided by a number of ardent disciples, they have made a special study of the influence of physical environment in determining occupations and social organisation, and in moulding indirectly through these the mental qualities of peoples. ”

“ We may extend the social circle in which we move—a circle perhaps narrowed and restricted through circumstances beyond our control—by making intimate acquaintances, perhaps even close friends, among a society long departed, but which, when we have once learnt the trick of it, it rests with us to revive. ”

“ Even in the towns our higher sentiments are largely formed in social meetings of one sort or another, accompanied by music, acting, dancing or speech-making, which draw one out of the more solitary currents of his thought and bring him into livelier unity with his fellows. ”

“ Within their hospitable walls men of all classes and occupations, independently, or in clubs and coteries, met not only for refreshment, but for social intercourse—to read and hear the news, to discuss the topics of the day, to entertain and be entertained. ”

“ And in these country-houses, with all their drawbacks, you do from time to time get the best of social intercourse, a phase of social life as gay, complex, and highly finished as it can possibly be made. ”

“ Their theory and practice of life, so far, was the theory and practice of their purely urban environment, of crowds, committees and grievances and cocksure little people like themselves—and lo, out of an atmosphere of cocksureness and hustle they had stepped, as it seemed without warning, into one of mystery and the endless patience of the earth. ”

“ For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life, we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments. ”

“ There is a vast deal of coming and going, and eating and drinking, and a corresponding amount of noise, but little or no conversation, discussion, easy quiet interchange of ideas and opinions, no regular social foundation of men of intellectual or literary calibre ensuring a perennial flow of conversation, and which, if it existed, would derive strength and assistance from the light superstructure of occasional visitors, with the much or the little they might individually contribute. ”

“ Social reality in its every aspect is shot through and through with feeling. Whatever be the categories according to which we divide social phenomena, feeling of some sort will have to be recognized in each and all of them. ”

“ And with this moral difference there went the difference in everything;—the sunlight and the shadows, the streets, the houses, and the people. Sunlight and shadows were blue-and-gold, strong and deep, and the forms they defined revealed, under their spell, a classic harmony. The people passing, intent on business, or sitting in front of the cafés, at ease in idleness, saw idleness and work as two quite different things, not to be confused; each yielding its own savour, its own satisfaction. ”

“ Everything now which is present in the individuals—the immediate concrete locations of all historical actuality—in the nature of impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influence upon others, or the reception of influence from them—all this I designate as the content or the material of socialization. In and of themselves, these materials with which life is filled, these motivations which impel it, are not social in their nature. ”

“ In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house, and yard, and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighbourhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. ”

“ Why, they have not had any change; no more, at least, than those a shade lower in the social scale, who go to the same watering-place year after year, spend their mornings on the beach, their afternoons in slumber, or a ‘country walk,’ and their evenings on the pier or parade, and who see the same people, say the same things, and do the same actions mechanically as they do in town, only perhaps in a smaller space, and under far more uncomfortable circumstances. ”

“ This was a time when people spoke to one another and laughed at little humours that they created and therefore strengthened the social bonds between themselves. Men drank and talked at the cafes while their women stayed by the stands and kiosks, exchanging goods and talking also. ”

“ A common purpose, the same society, the participation of the same amusements and pleasures, facilitate the formation of many interesting connexions. The opportunities of mutual intercourse are numerous: the social meetings are not hampered by the trammels of ceremony, and we readily acknowledge and enjoy mental and social talents wherever we meet with them. ”

“ Thus the social environment, working through long ages, may have constantly determined a certain degree of selection of the innate tendencies congenial to it, and a weeding out of the opposed tendencies ”

“ I want to move in the centre of this atmosphere, really to be always creating it, and I want the people close to me, the ones I care for, to live in this atmosphere, and other people, friendly outsiders, to come and dip into it and recognise it and tell themselves that it’s my atmosphere and very good. ”

“ Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character. The kind of country we live in, the system of government, of religion, of education, of business, of ordinary social customs and convention, this is what develops mankind, this is given by our fathers. ”

“ But few know how to center the social life in the home, in the out-of-doors, in clean sports, instead of letting it center about exotic conditions, unreasonable hours, and deadly refreshments. Only now and then does the present social life demand any exercise of mental power. ”

“ And so on to the most elaborate phases of self-consciousness and social consciousness, to the metaphysician pondering the Ego, or the sociologist meditating on the Social Organism. Self and society go together, as phases [Pg 9] of a common whole. I am aware of the social groups in which I live as immediately and authentically as I am aware of myself ”

“ It is socially physiological, so to speak; working in a normal way in consonance with known political methods and customs, along the rational lines of least resistance—making use of the natural, spontaneous life of the people in their ordinary social and political relationships and in their homes. ”

“ He loves to contemplate the entrance of new social ways and forms, into a world of old social preference and tradition; to show how there is waged, all the land over, a conflict between street and field, factory and farm, or between the instincts of blood and the capacities of brain ”