Quotes from Max Weber

The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune.

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.

The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.

spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

No sociologist, for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.

Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.

As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

The ability of mental concentration, as well as the absolutely essential feeling of obligation  to one's job, are here most often combined with a strict economy which calculates the possibility of high earnings, and a cool self-control and frugality which enormously increase performance.

Únicamente quien está seguro de no doblegarse cuando, desde su punto de vista, el mundo se muestra demasiado necio o demasiado abyecto para aquello que él está ofreciéndole; únicamente quien, ante todas estas adversidades, es capaz de oponer un "sin embargo"; únicamente un hombre constituido de esta manera podrá demostrar su "vocación para la política".

Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.

A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.

Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into.