The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of flourishing and complete life, which to-day we are in the habit of regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the question is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what people call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which under favourable circumstances actually would be healthy--that we are relatively sick.... The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion possible: _e.g._ our hysterical females. An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as well lead to symptoms of partial constraint, sense hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness, as a poor vitality does--the stimuli are differently determined, the effect is the same.... What is not the same is above all the ultimate result; the extreme torpidity of all morbid natures, after their nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with the states of the artist, who need in no wise repent his best moments.... He is rich enough for it all: he can squander without becoming poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius as a form of neurosis, we may perhaps think the same of artistic suggestive power,--and our artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely related to hysterical females!!! This, however, is only an argument against the present day, and not against artists in general. The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection suspension of the will ... (Schopenhauer's scandalous misunderstanding consisted in regarding art as a mere bridge to the denial of life)... The inartistic states are: those which impoverish, which subtract, which bleach, under which life suffers--the Christian.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.