To see things in the seed, that is genius用文言文怎么翻译？这句话是老子说的。_作业帮
To see things in the seed, that is genius用文言文怎么翻译？这句话是老子说的。
To see things in the seed, that is genius用文言文怎么翻译？这句话是老子说的。
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你可能喜欢Quotations on Genius
QUOTATIONS ON GENIUS
Great men grow tired of contentedness.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Great men are meteors that burn so that the earth may be lighted.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Men of genius are often dull
as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a
Longfellow
Every great action is extreme.
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
However brilliant an action may be, it should not be accounted great when it is not the result of great purpose.
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely
the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring.
But the lightning is
with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular
points - and is fatal.
Kierkegaard
The case with most men is that they go out into life with one or another accidental characteristic of personality
of which they say: Well, this is the way I am. I cannot do otherwise. Then the world gets to work on them and thus
the majority of men are ground into conformity. In each generation a small part cling to their &I cannot do
otherwise& and lose their minds. Finally there are a very few in each generation who in spite of all life's
terrors cling with more and more inwardness to this &I cannot do otherwise&. They are the geniuses. Their
&I cannot do otherwise& is an infinite thought, for if one were to cling firmly to a finite thought,
he would lose his mind.
Kierkegaard
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold,
I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.
Nietzsche (in Zarathustra)
Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
Kierkegaard
A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.
Joey Adams
Genius is born, not paid.
Oscar Wilde
I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease & a genuine, absolute disease. For everyday human existence it would more than suffice to have the ordinary share of that is to say, one half, one quarter that that which falls to the lot of a cultivated man in our wretched nineteenth century [...] It would, for instance, be quite enough to have the amount of consciousness by which all the so-called simple, direct people and men of action live.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Genius borrows nobly.
R.W Emerson
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.
R.W Emerson
Talent, lying in the understanding, genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely
Samuel T. Coleridge
Genius is not so much about new ideas as it is about clarity of ideas. Two people can have the same idea yet it
will be genius in the one and mediocrity in the other.
Kevin Solway
It has been seen that the object of a sane upbringing is increasingly to direct all emotion towards objects which
involve other people. Now basically the situation of being finite is an infinitely frustrating one, which would
be expected to arouse sensations of desperation and aggression - as indeed it may sometimes be seen to do in very
young children. I am aware that I must be careful, in using the word aggression, to state that I do not mean aggression
directed towards people. What I mean is an impersonal drive directed against reality - it is difficult to give
examples but it may be presumed that geniuses who are at all worthy of the name preserve a small degree of this.
However, since all emotion must be directed towards people, it is obvious that the only form of aggression which
a sane person can understand is aggression against people, which is probably better described as sadism or cruelty.
Celia Green
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age...The gods had given me almost everything.
I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, I made art a philosophy,
and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that
did not make people wonder...I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke
the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase,
and all existence in an epigram.
Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis
Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent - the power to do the right thing the first time.
Elbert Hubbard
Intellec geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein
To see things in the seed, that is genius.
The ability of someone to choose and arrange the details of their creative field guided by a vision is a major
hallmark of a genius.
John Briggs
Philosophy becomes poetry and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.
Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity. The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the
philosopher with many. What is genius or courage without a heart?
Oliver Goldsmith
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love,
love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang A. Mozart
Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
Denis Diderot
The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. G all else is claimed by death.
Edmund Spenser
Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others.
Mark Twain
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
R.W. Emerson
In every work of genius, we recognize our o they come back to us with a certain alienated
R.W. Emerson
The reason we have so few geniuses is that people do not have faith in what they know to be true.
Kevin Solway
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Owen Meredith Earl of Lytton
Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.
Gore Vidal
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Oscar Wilde's response to an American customs official
Genius is an infinite capacity for giving pains.
Oscar Wilde
Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.
Oscar Wilde
to believe your own thought. To believe that what is true for you is ultimately true.
a sledgehammer.
the fruit of labour and thought.
the ability to see the obvious.
the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.
something one can become.
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction.
Heinrich Heine
At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the E the words of an hallucinated
enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-R an obscure monk like
Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses.
The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
Gustave Le Bon
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square
in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man of genius makes no mistakes . His Errors are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom
delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud, of Van Gogh
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary
man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed
to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative
and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared frequently he does not accept
the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.
Loren Eiseley, in &The Mind as Nature&
Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound
Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
Robert Graves
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Samuel Johnson
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man of genius does not steal, he conquers.
The principal mark of a genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers
Arthur Koestler
Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) a genius brings something new. But our
time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.
Kierkegaard
It is through woman that ideality is born into the world and - what were man without her! There is many a man who
has become a genius through a woman, many a one a hero, many a one a poet, man but he did
not become a genius through the woman he married, for through her he only becam he did not
become a hero through the woman he married, for through her he o he did not become a poet
through the woman he married, for through her he
he did not become a saint through the woman
he married, for he did not marry, and would have married but one - the one w just as the others
became a genius, became a hero, became a poet through the help of the woman they did not marry.
Kierkegaard
Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.
Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still
would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Camille Paglia, in Sexual
There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.
Camille Paglia
Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God
leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.
Ambrose Bierce
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active
life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare,
- why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast
that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation glows incandescent, and may continue to
glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise
expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored
conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great t owns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt
many geniuses who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be
an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the
concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of a hence the rarity of these periods and
the exceptional aspect which they always wear.
William James
A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful
in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because
he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his
genius constantly occupies his mind.
William James
Genius always gives its best at first, prudence at last.
Lavater, J.C.
Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible,
that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.
It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.
Genius is nothing but continued attention.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
It is easy to live after the world' it is easy in solitude to but the great man
is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not cower to human opinion,
which feels itself accountable to a higher tribunal than man's, which respects itself too much to be the slave
of the many or the few.
The genius differs from us men in being able to endure isolation, his rank as a genius is proportionate to his
strength for enduring isolation, whereas we men are constantly in need of &the others,& we
die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.,
Kierkegaard
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the Headless Monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes
where prodded.
Charles Chaplin
Genius is the ability to escape Humanity is the need to escape.
Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order
to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where
strength of ch and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional
to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the
chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill
The millions are awake enoug but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual
exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive ... We must learn
to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin - more even than death... Thought is subversive
and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable
habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of
the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell
He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches: while he is a man of genius
who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in
itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not
see the whole meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things: shortsightedness
to others. Every mind is not a gauge and measure of truth. Nature has her surface and her dark recesses. She is
deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her fullest impressions that can penetrate her
shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have the boldness
or the power to reveal her mysteries to others.
William Hazlitt
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that
would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decisions, raising in one's favor
all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have
come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin
Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature.
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy
against him.
Jonathan Swift
Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the
mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than
others. Whoever, by the irresistable force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by
society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to
retreat into the solitude of his thoughts.
Heinrich Heine
Geni for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself... Further, genius consists
in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose.
The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless
and unprofitable is one of the chara it is their patent of nobility.
Schopenhauer
Genius does not herd with genius.
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very
easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have
had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to
seize and retain it.
William Hazlitt
The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what
the latter ac but even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that
it is the lapidary who gives value to the diamond which the peasant has dug up without knowing
its value.
Abbe Guillaume Raynal
What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that
what has been said has still not been said enough.
Eugene Delacroix
Genius might well be defined as the ability to make a platitude sound as though it were an original remark.
L. B. Walton
Genius never desires what does not exist.
Kierkegaard
The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are
very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passions are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen
by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest
and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
Oscar Wilde
Fortunately for us, there have been traitors and there have been heretics, blasphemers, thinkers, investigators,
lovers of liberty, men of genius who have given their lives to better the condition of their fellow-men. It may
be well enough here to ask the question: What is greatness? A great man adds to the sum of knowledge, extends the
horizon of thought, releases souls from the Bastille of fear, crosses unknown and mysterious seas, gives new islands
and new continents to the domain of thought, new constellations to the firmament of mind. A great man does not
se he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains he gives to
others. A great man throws pearls before swine, and the swine are sometimes changed to men. If the great had always
kept their pearls, vast multitudes would be barbarians now. A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon: in
superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy. Greatness is not th it cannot be thrust
men canno they can give place and power, but not greatness. The place does not
make the man, nor the scepter the king. Greatness is from within.
Robert Ingersoll
Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them.
Joseph Joubert
It is impossible that a genius - at least a literary genius - can ever be discove they are
so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't ge they can't perceive that
there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own.
Mark Twain
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.
Mark Twain
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no
intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.
Celia Green
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde
Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
Robert S. Lund
Genius makes its observations in short- talent writes them out at length.
Christian Nevell Bovee
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
C. W. Ceran
It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us.
Edmond Duranty
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Benjamin Franklin
The genius of any single man can no more equal learning, than a private purse hold way with the exchequer.
Francis Bacon
Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.
Paul Valery
Men of genius are the worst possible role models for men of talent.
Murray D. Edwards
Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.
Thomas Huxley
A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it.
Author unknown
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
Simone Weil
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
Bernard Berenson
Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.
Victor Hugo
The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller
Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which
once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.
Friedrich Schlegel
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
Joshua Reynolds
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
In following the strong bent of his genius, he was self assured that he should 'create the taste by which he is
to be enjoyed.
Mediocrity is self-inflicted. Genius is self-bestowed.
Walter Russell
Everyone is a genius
a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking
once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not
because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Genius is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
Pablo Picasso
Once you had to be a genius to make works of art. Now you have to be a genius to understand them.
Roy Emmins
When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination,
we call it genius.
William Crashaw
So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius.
Author Unknown
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
Winston Churchill
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking life by the scruff of the neck.
Christopher Quill
Genius is that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.
Samuel Johnson
Improvement
but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.
William Blake
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
Abraham Lincoln
Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy,
he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which
will imbitter his days and spoil him for his proper work.
R.W. Emerson
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varese (1883 - 1965)
Every man is a potential genius until he does something.
Sir Herbert Beerbohm
Geniuses experience a second adolescence, whereas other people are only young once.
If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.
True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genii.
Puzant Thomajan
Genius has somew But of the childish not a touch or taint.
Robert Browning
Otto Weininger on Genius
The man of genius is he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said
to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and
that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated,
more richly endowed, and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality,
and the more really and strongly he has these others within him. If comprehension of those about him only flickers
in him like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give
distinction and character to his creations. The ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself
in all men, to reveal h and so also the aim of the philosopher is to discover all others in
himself, to fuse them into a unit which is his own unit.
Otto Weininger
The ideal genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and all their dislikes. There is
in him not only the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets,
to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and those most deeply, because he has
the greatest number of things to contrast and compare them with. The genius is he who is conscious of most, and
of that most acutely. And so without doubt his sensation but this must not be understood as
implying, say, in the artist the keenest power of vision, in the composer th the measure of
genius is not to be taken from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the perceiving brain.
Otto Weininger
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
I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined
from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man
who had small
greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and
probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only
a genius is able to understand a genius. -
Otto Weininger
The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius - fools believe it comes from the influence of Venus, or
the spinal degeneration of neurasthenics - is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task of bearing the
whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds. But
the higher a man mounts, the gre all genius is a conquering of chaos, mystery, and darkness,
and if it degenerates and goes to pieces, the ruin is greater in proportion to the success. The genius which runs
to madness it has chosen happiness instead of morality. All madness is the outcome of the
insupportability of suffering attached to all consciousness.
Otto Weininger
No one suffers so much as he [the genius] with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives.
For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only &by suffering& that a man knows. If compassion is not itself
clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the
acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And the genius suffers most
because he suffers with but he suffers most through his understanding. . . .
Otto Weininger
It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again
to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling
that they are times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when
they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so
are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men. Every great man has such
periods, of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self-confidence, in which
times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of the stimulus to
times which call forth the blind criticisms 'How such a genius is degenerating!' 'How he has played
himself out!' 'How he repeates himself!' and so forth.
Otto Weininger
T it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not
it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.
Otto Weininger
The age does not create the genius it requires. The genius is not the product of his age, is not to be explained
by it, and we do him no honour if we attempt to account for him by it . . . And as the causes of its appearance
do not lie in any one age, so also the consequences are not limited by time. The achievements of genius live for
ever, and time cannot change them. By his works a man of genius is granted immortality on the earth, and thus in
a threefold manner he has transcended time. His universal comprehension and memory forbid the annihilation of his
experiences with the passing of the moment in his birth is independent of his age, and his
work never dies.
Otto Weininger
Genius is, in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man, and, therefore, every man ought
to have some quality of it, and it should be regarded as a possible principle for every one. Genius is the highest
morality, and, therefore, it is every one's duty. Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which
the whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genius is something which 'men of genius'
it is the greatest exertion and the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a man. A man
may become a genius if he wishes to. But at once it will certainly be said: &Very many men would like very
much to be 'original geniuses,'& and their wish has no effect. But if these men who &would like very
much& had a livelier sense of what is signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical
with universal responsibility - and until that is grasped it will only be a wish and not a determination - it is
highly probable that a very large number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.
Otto Weininger
The most powerful musical motifs of world-music are those in which the representation of the breaking-through of
time within time, the breaking out of time, is attempted, in which an ictus falls upon the tonic such that it reabsorbs
the other parts of the melody (which as a w separate points unified by the I) and in this
manner sublimates the melody. The end of the Grail-motif in 'Parsifal,' the Siegfried-motif, are such melodies.
There is, however, an act that, so to speak, reabsorbs the future in itself, experiences in advance all future
falling back into immorality already as guilt, no less than all the immoral past, and by this means grows out over
and beyond both: A timeless setting of the character, rebirth. It is the act by which genius comes to be.
Otto Weininger
Since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who live entirely in and through their souls, the
whole universe thus having its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without the quality of
genius. . . . There is no female genius, and there never has been one . . . and there never can be one.
Those who are in favour of laxity in these matters, and are anxious to extend and enlarge the idea of genius in
order to make it possible to include women, would simply by such action destroy the concept of genius. . . . How
could a soulless being possess genius? The possession of genius is ident and if any one were
to try to combine woman and profundity as subject and predicate, he would be contradicted on all sides. A female
genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply intensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious
Otto Weininger
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 or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of absolute beauty,
and then he is an artist.
Otto Weininger
In those rare individual cases where women approach genius they also approach masculinity.
Otto Weininger
The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the comple but woman herself is only a
part of the Universe, and the part ca femaleness can never include genius. This lack of genius
on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a monad, and cannot reflect the Universe.
Otto Weininger
There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they
have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have
needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love
are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.
Otto Weininger
A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and derives from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding
star serves also as a light to other nations. As speech has been created by a few great men, the most extraordinary
wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which reveals itself to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked
by the stupid professional philologists.
Otto Weininger
The genius is not a critic of language, but its creator, as he is the creator of all the mental achievements which
are the material of culture and which make up the objective mind, the spirit of the peoples. The &timeless&
men are those who make history, for history can be made only by those who are not floating with the stream. It
is only those who are unconditioned by time who have real value, and whose productions have an enduring force.
And the events that become forces of culture become so only because they have an enduring value. -
Otto Weininger
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. The great man has a history, the emperor is only a part of history. The great man
time creates and time destroys the emperor.
Otto Weininger
It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to
an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial
side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered
human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law. . . .
Otto Weininger
The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the cent the great
man contains the whole uni genius is the living microcosm. He is not an intricate mosaic,
a chemical combination of an infinit the argument in chap. iv. as to his relation to other
men and things must not be he is everything. In him and through him all psychical manifestations
cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of
science. For the genius the ego is the all, the genius sees nature and all
the relations of things flas he has not to build bridges of stones between them.
Otto Weininger
The man of genius is he whose ego has acquired consciousness. He is enabled by it to distinguish the fact that
others are different, to perceive the &ego& of other men, even when it is not pronounced enough for them
to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who feels that every other man is also an ego, a monad, an
individual centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and a distinct past, he alone is
in a position to avoid making use of his neighbours as means to an end.
Otto Weininger
The history of the human race (naturally I mean the history of its mind and not merely its wars) is readily intelligible
on the theory of the appearance of genius, and of the imitation by the more monkey-like individuals of the conduct
of those with genius. The chief stages, no doubt, were house- building, agriculture, and above all, speech. Every
single word has been the invention of a single man, as, indeed, we still see, if we leave out of consideration
the merely technical terms. How else could language have arisen? The earliest words were &onomatopoetic&;
a sound similar to the exciting cause was evolved almost without the will of the speaker, in direct response to
the sensuous stimulation. All the other words were originally metaphors, or comparisons, a kind of primitive poetry,
for all prose has come from poetry. Many, perhaps the majority of the greatest geniuses, have remained unknown.
Think of the proverbs, now almost commonplaces, such as &one good turn deserves another.& These were
said for the first time by some great man. How many quotations from the classics, or sayings of Christ, have passed
into the common language, so that we have to think twice before we can remember who were the authors of them. Language
is as little the work of the multitude as our ballads. Every form of speech owes much that is not acknowledged
to individuals of another language. Because of the universality of genius, the words and phrases that he invents
are useful not only to those who use the language in which he wrote them. A nation orients itself by its own geniuses,
and derives from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding star serves also as a light to other nations.
As speech has been created by a few great men, the most extraordinary wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which
reveals itself to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked by the stupid professional philologists.
Otto Weininger