19 Quotes by 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.
- The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.
- 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.
- Secrecy sets barriers between men, but at the same time offers the seductive temptation to break through the barriers by gossip or confession.
- Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being.
- The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.
- Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.
- 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.
- Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.
- 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.
- For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.
- 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.
- 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.
- Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it.
- 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.
- 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 through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events.
- 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.
- Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.
Privacy policy
