Georg Simmel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

~ Georg Simmel

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

~ 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

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