Georg Simmel

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.