“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 , book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 124.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very…" by Otto Weininger?
Otto Weininger photo
Otto Weininger 41
austrian philosopher and writer 1880–1903

Related quotes

Wyndham Lewis photo

“Is it with us a compensatory fact that, being more stupid in the mass, we shoot up higher, when we do shoot up, in dazzling concentrations of intellectual power and so produce what we describe as "genius"? For "genius" is with us an individual thing. Whereas all Jews are little geniuses.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

The Jews, are they human? 1939, p. 68.

William Ellery Channing photo

“Of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, at the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves. They little suspect its extent, as little as the savage apprehends the energy which the mind is created to exert on the material world.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Otto Weininger photo

“If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 121.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington photo

“The history of a battle, is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance...”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) British soldier and statesman

Letter to John Croker (8 August 1815), as quoted in The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848) by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Volume I Chapter 5 http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/european/TheHistoryofEnglandfromtheAccessionofJamesIIVol1/chap5.html, p. 180.; and in The Waterloo Letters (1891) edited by H. T. Sibome

Otto Weininger photo

“That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual himself quite independently of all social codes”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

so condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the social life of man
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 151.

George Steiner photo

“In the United States dramatically, here fortunately much less so, the book store as we have known it is dying. In the United States it is now largely an emporium, featuring music, records, Christmas cards, a large range fo semi-cultural and kitsch products with books fighting for their actual spatial lives. In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good book stores have had to close, and what we have now are text book emporia which are not book stores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great book store has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a book store.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 27.
Do Books Matter?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“Any casual observer of humankind will have been struck by the incongruity with which we may lavish great passion upon the trivial, the frivolous, and the ephemeral or upon collective crusades to which, suddenly and with little reason or reflection, we sacrifice everything. When ordinary men and women, living in the ordinary situations society offers them, move beyond the domain of their most intimate personal relations, they often find little to deserve their surviving intensity—little other than the great historical storms that occasionally sweep them up or fanciful individual escapes that remain disconnected from their daily lives…. A program like the one outlined here remains united to the cause of progressive thought by its emphasis upon the liberation of ordinary people from drudgery and humiliation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 250-1

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Man of the People", p. 108
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Otto Weininger photo

“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 book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 122-123.

H. G. Wells photo

“Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”

H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

Related topics