Otto Weininger famous quotes

Sending children away to get control of their anger perpetuates the feeling of 'badness" inside them...Chances are they were already feeling not very good about themselves before the outburst and the isolation just serves to confirm in their own minds that they were right.
-- Otto Weininger

#Children #Feelings #Mind

Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of absolute beauty, and then he is an artist.
-- Otto Weininger

#Dream #Artist #Reality

Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement.
-- Otto Weininger

#Answers #Faults #Improvement

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.
-- Otto Weininger

#Race #Two #Decision

An individual's arrogance is always in proportion to his lack of self-assurance.
-- Otto Weininger

#Self #Arrogance #Individual

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.
-- Otto Weininger

#Women #Thinking #Opinion

A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence.
-- Otto Weininger

#America #Genius #Morality

Everything evil is revenge.
-- Otto Weininger

#Revenge #Evil

The Jew is an inborn Communist.
-- Otto Weininger

#Communist #Jew

In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Order #Able

Fate determines many things, no matter how we struggle.
-- Otto Weininger

#Struggle #Fate #Matter

The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius.
-- Otto Weininger

#Running #Genius #Madness

Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn - exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared.
-- Otto Weininger

#Flames #Fire #Oxygen

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself
-- Otto Weininger

#Logic #Ethics #Duty

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Wish #World

The fixed stars signify the angel in man. That is why man orients himself by them; and that is why women have no appreciation for the starry sky; because they have no sense of the angel in man.
-- Otto Weininger

#Appreciation #Stars #Angel

To understand a man is really to be that man.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men

Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.
-- Otto Weininger

#May #Genius #Common

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.
-- Otto Weininger

#Genius #Chaos #Mystery

There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals; between chemical combinations and simple mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds [...]. The improbability may henceforth be taken for granted of finding in Nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that any living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side, or wholly on the other, of the line.
-- Otto Weininger

#Taken #Animal #Simple

As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius.
-- Otto Weininger

#Past #Men #Remembrance

Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Genius #Conscious

Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.
-- Otto Weininger

#Genius #Kind #Masculinity

Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness.
-- Otto Weininger

#Blue #Law #Yellow

In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.
-- Otto Weininger

#Character #Men #Opposites

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Special #Chess

The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as a physiognomical measure of his ... genius.
-- Otto Weininger

#Taken #Men #Numbers

Not only virtue, but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind.
-- Otto Weininger

#Tasks #Virtue #Sanctity

The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Causality #Doe

A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth.
-- Otto Weininger

#Lying #Consciousness #Standards

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, ... deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Genius #Littles

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.
-- Otto Weininger

#Reality #Doe #Genius

A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Important #Proportion

A man is first reverent about himself, and self-respect is the first stage in reverence for all things.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Self #Firsts

The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Giving #Insanity

There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning.
-- Otto Weininger

#Expression #Years #Ideas

With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.
-- Otto Weininger

#Men #Rivers #Genius