“Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.”
"The Englishman of Etretat"
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Guy De Maupassant59
French writer 1850–1893Related quotes
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
“Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords
On Søren Kierkegaard, in "A Knight of Doleful Countenance", p. 192
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: He suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond.
“The universe is mad, slightly mad.”
Allen Ginsberg book Reality Sandwiches
Source: Reality Sandwiches
“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”
Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer
Le propre d’un grand homme est de dérouter les calculs ordinaires. Il est sublime et attendrissant, naïf et gigantesque.
Part I, ch. XV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist
On leadership and the relation between madness, heresy, and genius.
Ideas as Art (2006)
“Many a superior brain is blockaded by inferior thoughts.”
Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 69