When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt… - Cyril Connolly

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When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness — and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.