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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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 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.”

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

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

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