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.
Interpretation
True genius often lies in unrecognized talent and the balance of sanity and madness.
In this quote, Guy De Maupassant suggests that society tends to label individuals as geniuses based on superficial traits rather than true intellectual capability. He implies that many genuinely great minds may remain unacknowledged, while those who exhibit eccentricities could be celebrated, regardless of their actual mental acuity. This reflection raises questions about the nature of creativity and the fine line between brilliance and madness.
In practice
In a talk about creativity in the arts, one might mention this quote to illustrate how society perceives artistic minds.
Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
It is with our Passions, as it is with Fire and Water, they are 'Good Servants,' but 'Bad Masters.'
Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad
What you do thunders above your head so loudly, I cannot hear the words you speak.
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.
In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.
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