Paul Julius Möbius

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“Without a medical evaluation you cannot understand anybody. It is intolerable to see men and their actions judged by linguists and other armchair pundits. They have no inkling that more is needed here than moralizing and the average knowledge of people...we have to abandon the prevalent old division into healthy and sick minds. Everybody is pathological to a certain degree...the more so the more elevated his standing....Only myth and cliché have it that a person must be either sane or crazy.”

“It is with mathematics not otherwise than it is with music, painting or poetry. Anyone can become a lawyer, doctor or chemist, and as such may succeed well, provided he is clever and industrious, but not every one can become a painter, or a musician, or a mathematician: general cleverness and industry alone count here for nothing.”

“Persons, who have a decided mathematical talent, constitute, as it were, a favored class. They bear the same relation to the rest of mankind that those who are academically trained bear to those who are not.”

“Ist der weibliche Schwachsinn nicht nur vorhanden, sondern auch nothwendig, er ist nicht nur ein physiologisches Factum, sondern auch ein physiologisches Postulat. Wollen wir ein Weib, das ganz seinen Mutterberuf erfüllt, so kann es nicht ein männliches Gehirn haben. ... Die modernen Närrinnen sind schlechte Gebärerinnen und schlechte Mütter. In dem Grade, in dem die „Civilisation“ wächst, sinkt die Fruchtbarkeit, je besser die Schulen werden, um so schlechter werden die Wochenbetten, um so geringer wird die Milchabsonderung, kurz, um so untauglicher werden die Weiber.”