Hassan

“A genius flirts with madness.”
― E.C. Lemus

“... nothing is easier than to distance ourselves from great figures, whether through a negative interpretation or through idealization. Denigration and idealization are twins with the same basic motive: to avoid taking responsibility for the discoveries before us and to avoid taking responsibility for emulating the lives of great individuals. If we find severe flaws in the personality of the "genius," we can look upon him as some kind of genetic freak, closely linked to the madman, whose contributions were almost an incidental offshoot of his weird personality. If we consider the great man a triumphant genius with a basically unflawed personality, we can make small demands upon ourselves since we lack genius and possess flaws. Still another way of dealing with the great man is simply through indifference. One explains his loneliness and suffering through the kind of cliches Reich hated: "A genius is always one hundred years ahead of his time," or, "A genius always meets opposition in his lifetime."

The need for distance from greatness is especially intense when we are dealing with persons who make the implicit demand: You must change your life if you are truly to understand what I have discovered.”
― Myron R. Sharaf, Fury On Earth: A Biography Of Wilhelm Reich

“A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”
― Charles Bukowski