"Knowledge is socially distributed" (p. 237).

"We have, then a common surrounding to be defined by our common interests, his and mine. To be sure, he and I will have a different system of relevances and a different knowledge of the common surrounding if for no other reason that he sees from "there" everything that I am seeing from "here" (p. 237).

"Imposed relevances remain empty, unfulfilled anticipations" (p. 238).

"The expert is at home only in a system of imposed relevances--imposed, that is, by the problems pre-established within his field. Or to be more precise, by his decision to become an expert he has accepted the relevances imposed within his field as the intrinsic, and the only intrinsic, relevances of his acting and thinking. But his field is rigidly limiting" (p. 241).

"The expert starts from the assumption not only that the system of problems established within his field is relevant but that it is the only relevant system. All his knowledge is referred to this frame of reference which has been established once and for all. He who does not accept it as the monopolized system of his intrinsic relevances does not share with the expert a universe of discourse" (p. 242).

"It is the meaning of our experiences, and not the ontological structure of the objects, which constitutes reality" (p. 252).

"Imagining itself is, however, necessarily inefficient and stays under all circumstances outside the hierarchies of plans and purposes valid within the world of working. The imagining self does not transform the outer world" (p. 258).

"Scientific theorizing does not serve any practical purpose. Its aim is not to master the world but to observe and possibly to understand it . . ." (p. 258).

"The attitude of the 'disinterested observer' is based upon a peculiar attention … la vie as the prerequisite of all theorizing. It consists in the abandoning of the system of relevances which prevails within the practical sphere of the natural attitude" (p. 259).

"The answer to the question 'what does this social world mean for me the observer?' requires as a prerequisite the answering of the quite other questions 'what does this social world mean for the observed actor within this world and what did he mean by his acting within it?' In putting our questions thus we no longer naively accept the social world and its current idealizations and formalizations as ready-made and meaningful beyond all question, but we undertake to study the process of idealizing and formalizing as such, the genesis of the meaning which social phenomena have for us as well as for the actors, the mechanism of the activity by which human beings understand one another and themselves. We are always free, and sometimes obliged, to do so" (p. 269).

When one who has left home writes a letter, "the letter-writer addresses himself to the type of addressee as he knew him when they separated, and the addressee reads the letter as written by the person typically the same as the one he left behind" (p. 301).