Georg Simmel Quotes

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

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations.

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

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 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.

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

Secrecy sets barriers between men, but at the same time offers the seductive temptation to break through the barriers by gossip or confession.

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

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.

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.

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 separate the connected, or connect the separate.

Wandering, (is) considered as a state of detachment form every given point in space.

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 relationship with that personal relationship.

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

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.

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

Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.