Georg Simmel Quotes

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

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.

— Georg Simmel

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 completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“[Nostalgic sentiments] are nothing other than the rosy illumination of a past that has been spared the shadows of the present.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“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 in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.”

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.”

— Georg Simmel

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“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 outer and inner stimuli.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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.

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel

“On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.”

— Georg Simmel

“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 through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“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, to be paid attention to and be considered apart from the rest Fashion elevates the insignificant by making it in the representative of a totality, the particular incarnation of a common spirit. Its function is to make possible the kind of social obedience which is at the same time individual differentiation It is the mixing of submission and the feeling of domination that is in action here.”

— Georg Simmel

“Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind.”

— Georg Simmel

“Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

“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.”

— Georg Simmel