Georg Simmel

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture is one reason for the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, above all Nietzsche, harbour against the metropolis.

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.

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.

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.

All feeling of shame rests upon isolation of the individual; it arises whenever stress is laid upon the ego, whenever the attention of a circle is drawn to such an individual — in reality or only in his imagination — which at the same time is felt to be in some way incongruous.

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the given facts.