Quotes from Georg Simmel

Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.

Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.

The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.

Music and love are the only accomplishments of humanity which do not, in an absolute sense, have to be called attempts with unsuitable means.

For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.

Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it.

He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know.

For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men.

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 duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.

Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.

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 must accept upon faith and belief.

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 schedule.

Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.

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 means dearth to the personality of the individual.

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 duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

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 mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.

Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one's worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.

One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.

Our fellowman either may voluntarily reveal to us the truth about himself, or by dissimulation he may deceive us as to the truth. No other object of knowledge can thus of its own initiative, either enlighten us with reference to itself or conceal itself, as a human being can. No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood.

All feeling of shame rests upon isolation of the individual; it arises whenever stress is laid upon the ego , whenever the attention of a circle is drawn to such an individual — in reality or only in his imagination —which at the same time is felt to be in some way incongruous. For that reason retiring and weak natures particularly incline to feelings of shame.

Since one never can absolutely know another, as this would mean knowledge of every particular thought and feeling; since we must rather form a conception of a personal unity out of the fragments of another person in which alone he is accessible to us, the unity so formed necessarily depends upon that portion of the Other which our standpoint toward him permits us to see.