The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Quotes

“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
― Weber Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases, the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgement as a similar lack of perspective toward men.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings

“Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism

“spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole,”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The ability of mental concentration, as well as the absolutely essential feeling of obligation  to one’s job, are here most often combined with a strict economy which calculates the possibility of high earnings, and a cool self-control and frugality which enormously increase performance.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Low wages fail even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any sort of skilled labour, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The idea that modern labour has an ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other to-day. This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wanderjahren, and in the end which he gave to the life of his Faust. For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action, The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job.

Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact; it may even support it directly on account of the repudiation of dialectic doctrines. Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the interests of rational conduct.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Work hard in your calling.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise. ”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was “the last of our heroisms”, as Carlyle, not without reason, has said. ”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”.114 But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling--we, on the other hand, must be.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Today's capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell in which he is obliged to live. It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the "market," the norms of its economic activity. The manufacturer who consistently defies these norms will just as surely be forced out of business as the worker who cannot or will not conform will be thrown out of work.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust, sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“If capitalism begins as the practical idealism of the aspiring bourgeoisie, it ends, Weber suggests in his concluding pages, as an orgy of materialism.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: With linked Table of Contents

“Para nosotros, un acto de economía “capitalista” significa un acto que descansa en la expectativa de una ganancia debida al juego de recíprocas probabilidades de cambio; es decir, en probabilidades (formalmente) pacíficas de lucro.”
― Max Weber, La ética protestante y el espíritu del capitalismo (Sociologia)

“Yo temo: donde la riqueza aumenta, la religión disminuye en medida idéntica; no veo, pues, cómo sea posible, de acuerdo con la naturaleza de las cosas, una larga duración de cada nuevo despertar de la religiosidad verdadera. Pues, necesariamente, la religión produce laboriosidad (industry) y sobriedad (frugality), las cuales son a su vez causa de riqueza. Pero una vez que esta // riqueza aumenta, aumentan con ella la soberbia, la pasión y el amor al mundo en todas sus formas. ¿Cómo ha de ser, pues, posible que pueda durar mucho el metodismo, que es una religión del corazón, aun cuando ahora la veamos crecer como un árbol frondoso?”
― Max Weber, La ética protestante y el espíritu del capitalismo (Sociologia)

“In fact, the summum bonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Today's capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell in which he is obliged to live. It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the "market," the norms of its economic activity.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“To-day the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Without doubt Christian asceticism, both outwardly and in its inner meaning, contains many different things. But it has had a definitely rational character in its highest Occidental forms as early as the Middle Ages, and in several forms even in antiquity. The great historical significance of Western monasticism, as contrasted with that of the Orient, is based on this fact, not in all cases, but in its general type. In the rules of St. Benedict, still more with the monks of Cluny, again with the Cistercians, and most strongly the Jesuits, it has become emancipated from planless otherworldliness and irrational self-torture. It had developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturæ, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature. It attempted to subject man to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to bring his actions under constant self-control with a careful consideration of their ethical consequences. Thus it trained the monk, objectively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of God, and thereby further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public—house of the common man. ”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“St. Paul’s “He who will not work shall not eat” holds”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“He must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard. Of”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism