Otto Weininger Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself. They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth.

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

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

Otto Weininger
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
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
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
That is why man can also never understand himself: For he is himself a timeless act; an act which he performs continuously, and there is no moment in which he might not perform it, as there would have to be to understand himself.

Otto Weininger
People should also not want to determine themselves causally in such a way: I will now … become good once and for all, and do good by nature, because I could not then do anything else. For through this one denies the freedom which can in each moment negate all the past. … One makes himself into an object when one establishes causality in that way; for a morality to which I have been compelled is already not a morality.

Otto Weininger