Georg Simmel Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations.
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Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.
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Der Fremde ist uns nah, insofern wir Gleichheiten nationaler oder sozialer, berufsmäßiger oder allgemein menschlicher Art zwischen ihm und uns fühlen; er ist uns fern, insofern diese Gleichheiten über ihn und uns hinausreichen und uns beide nur verbinden, weil sie überhaupt sehr Viele verbinden.
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I understand the task of sociology to be description and determination of the historical-psychological origin of those forms in which interactions take place between human beings. The totality of these interactions, springing from the most diverse impulses, directed toward the most diverse objects, and aiming at the most diverse ends, constitutes 'society.'
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If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the 'stranger' presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.
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The social game has a deeper double meaning—that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually 'play' 'society.'
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Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.
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In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that 'error is life and knowledge is death,' because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish.
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The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.
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The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the 'objective spirit' over the 'subjective spirit.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.
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Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given.
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For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.
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Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.
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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.
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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.
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Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it.
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Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.
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The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.