“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.”

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

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 "If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men…" by Otto Weininger?
Otto Weininger photo
Otto Weininger 41
austrian philosopher and writer 1880–1903

Related quotes

Denis Diderot photo

“Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

“Diseases"
Elements of Physiology (1875)

Mark Kac photo

“There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians… Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Mark Kac about Richard Feynman, cited in: Scott D. Tremaine (2011) " John norris Bahcall. 1934–2005. A Biographical Memoir http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bahcall-john-n.pdf".

John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Yoshida Shoin photo

“To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. II.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Bertrand Russell photo

“In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education

“Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 12; Cited in: Nawaz Sharif, Pakorn Adulbhan (1978) Systems models for decision making. p. 38

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Otto Weininger photo
Frank Wilczek photo

“An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 12.

Albert Einstein photo

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. ”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Related topics