But child, whatever possesses you to think of me as a “philosopher”, or even to wish to do so? Am I not after all the stupidest person imaginable? Judged by the standards of a wise man, I must straightway seem criminal, simply because I know so much and so many things, and, more especially, know that wisdom is so desirable and so wholly admirable. But this, in turn, gives me my characteristic ability to leap over abysses which the wisest of men are not even aware of. That is why I am a poet, and - what’s worse - a musician. Just consider my music, with its delicate, oh so delicate, mysteriously flowing humours penetrating the most subtle pores of feeling to reach the very marrow of life, where it overwhelms everything that looks like sagacity and the self-interested powers of self-preservation, sweeping away all that belongs to the delusive madness of personality and leaving only that wondrously sublime sigh with which we confess to our sense of powerlessness - : how shall I be a wise man when it is only in such a state of raving madness that I am totally at home?
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Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 243