The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature

But there is always a limit to human capacity; and no one can be a great genius without having some decidedly weak side, it may even be, some intellectual narrowness

Great, genuine and extraordinary work can be done only in so far as its author disregards the method, the thoughts, the opinions of his contemporaries, and quietly works on, in spite of their criticism, on his side despising what they praise.

It is often the case that a great mind prefers soliloquy to the dialogue he may have in this world

Let us, then, not be surprised if we find men of genius generally unsociable and repellent

All this is part of the reward of genius, and compensates him for a lonely existence in a world with which he has nothing in common and no sympathies

A man of learning is a man who has learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we learn something which the genius has learned from nobody

a man will praise a thing only so far as he hopes to be able to imitate it himself

In Lichtenberg's Miscellaneous Writings I find this sentence quoted: Modesty should be the virtue of those who possess no other.

No one is taken for what he is, but for what others make of him

As Goethe once remarked to me, nowhere is there so much dishonesty as in literature.