Georg Simmel Quotes

37 quotes in 659 categories

• Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.
• For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too frequently…
• By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the…
• The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by…
• Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive…
• For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.
• Music and love are the only accomplishments of humanity which do not, in an absolute sense, have to be called attempts with unsuitable means.
• Fashion is the playing area for individuals that lack interior autonomy and need more support points, but who nonetheless feel the need to stand out,…
• In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who…
• The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of…
• The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value…
• Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being.
• Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.
• Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time…
• The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.
• In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he…
• Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal…
• Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety…
• Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.
• In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only…

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