Top 35 Georg Simmel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind.”

— Georg Simmel

2. “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”

— Georg Simmel

3. “He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

5. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

7. “A man is well educated when he knows where to find what he doesn’t know.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

12. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

13. “Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.”

— Georg Simmel

14. “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

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

— Georg Simmel

16. “In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected, or connect the separate.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

18. “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

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

— Georg Simmel

20. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

22. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

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

— Georg Simmel

25. “Our fellowman either may voluntarily reveal to us the truth about himself, or by dissimulation he may deceive us as to the truth. No other object of knowledge can thus of its own initiative, either enlighten us with reference to itself or conceal itself, as a human being can. No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood.”

— Georg Simmel

26. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

27. “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

28. “Since one never can absolutely know another, as this would mean knowledge of every particular thought and feeling; since we must rather form a conception of a personal unity out of the fragments of another person in which alone he is accessible to us, the unity so formed necessarily depends upon that portion of the Other which our standpoint toward him permits us to see.”

— Georg Simmel

29. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Georg Simmel

33. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

34. “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.”

— Georg Simmel

35. “Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, the fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.”

— Georg Simmel