"There was never a great genius without a touch of madness"
What is madness? In this world where we live in societies with many other people, the most important, normal, or "wise" thing to do is to follow what everybody else does. To do things that the majority doesn't do? That is "madness".
While a genius and a lunatic seem to be the opposite of each other, they share a common feature: both are unusual. Looking at all the geniuses in history: poets, painters, navigators, inventors, etc, what made them so special was that they did something new, something out of the norm.
We take electric lighting for granted nowadays because Thomas Edison made light bulbs so practical and easy for us to use, it would be like a nightmare if all the lights went out. But to people who lived in the era before light bulbs were invented, who lived with candles and fire for light all their lives, it'd be nonsense to think that there could be any other ways to get light. So, yes, scientists might had been called mad men when they were striving and failing and striving again to develop the use of electric light, but look at how that turned out - we can now enjoy one of the greatest inventions of history!
If we look at great artists like Picasso and Dali, geniuses without a doubt, we can see that their success really stem from their touch of madness, or what we call creativity. Picasso is famous for his portraits with distorted faces, where the nose goes up between the eyes and the mouth extends out of the face; Dali is a surrealist painter who loves to draw elongated and melting images. Certainly there were hints of madness that inspired the ridiculous yet remarkable ideas. But people whose artwork that are still world renowned after decades can't be complete lunatics, can they?
Are geniuses mad? Or is it simply us who are too ordinary to understand?
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