The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. — Max Weber

It’s the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning. — Max Weber

The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution. — Max Weber

The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since — Max Weber

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth. — Emile Durkheim

Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance. — Max Weber

Man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money. — Max Weber

Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all–too–human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity. — Max Weber

Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics. — Max Weber

Because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless. — Max Weber

The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. — Max Weber

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well–to–do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life. — Emile Durkheim

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. — Max Weber

Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth–that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. — Max Weber

The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectarian. He sees in it only a time of sad trial; he also thinks that his true country is not of this world. — Emile Durkheim

It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh. — Emile Durkheim

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics. — Max Weber

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another. — Max Weber

Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose. — Max Weber

From the physical point of view, a man is nothing more than a system of cells, or from the mental point of view, than a system of representations; in either case, he differs only in degree from animals. — Emile Durkheim

The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment. — Max Weber

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility. — Max Weber