All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

The remark advances a deliberately provocative thesis: that cultural and spiritual breakthroughs are disproportionately produced by people whose heightened sensitivity, anxiety, or inner conflict sets them at odds with ordinary life. “Neurotics” here functions less as a clinical diagnosis than as a shorthand for those driven by obsessive attention, suffering, and self-scrutiny—traits that can fuel both religious vision and artistic invention. The exclusivity (“they and only they”) is rhetorical, meant to invert bourgeois assumptions that health and balance are the sources of greatness. It also aligns with a modernist tendency to treat illness and marginality as engines of perception, where pain becomes a catalyst for form, insight, and transcendence.