Arthur Schopenhauer - What is Genius? lyrics

… the secret of genius, then, lies in the clear and impartial perception of the objective, the essential and the universal. It is this removal of the personal equation which leaves the genius so maladapted in the world of willful, practical, personal activity. By seeing so far he does not see what is near; he is imprudent and “queer”; and while his vision is hitched to the stars he falls into a well. Hence, partly, the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground – and never meet. The man of genius has his compensations and does not need company so much as people who live in the perpetual dependence on what is outside them. The pleasure which he receives from all beauty, the consolation which art affords, the enthusiasm of the artist, etc., enable him to forget the cares of life, and repay him for the suffering that increases in proportion to his clearness of consciousness, and for his desert loneliness among a different race of men. The result, however, is that the genius is forced into isolation, and sometimes into madness. The extreme sensitiveness which brings him pain along with imagination and intuition, combines with solitude and mal-adaptation to break the bonds that hold the mind to reality.”