Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.
Georg SimmelMusic and love are the only accomplishments of humanity which do not, in an absolute sense, have to be called attempts with unsuitable means.
Georg SimmelEvery superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.
Georg SimmelThe 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 SimmelThe 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