Georg Brandes quotes

Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.
-- Georg Brandes

#Bullets #Hot #Poor

I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.
-- Georg Brandes

#Hours

The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.
-- Georg Brandes

#War #Soldier #Tin

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
-- Georg Brandes

#Art #Past #Men

History, in [Nietzsche's] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.
-- Georg Brandes

#Running #Teacher #Fighting

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.
-- Georg Brandes

#Lying #Passion #Men

It appears to [Nietzsche] that the modern age has produced for imitation three types of man ... First, Rousseau's man, the Titan who raises himself ... and in his need calls upon holy nature. Then Goethe's man ... a spectator of the world ... [Third] Schopenhauer's man ... voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth.
-- Georg Brandes

#Pain #Men #Age

The educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
-- Georg Brandes

#Age #Helping #Educator

The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.
-- Georg Brandes

#Children #Men #Age

We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist.
-- Georg Brandes

#Apology #Men #Thinking

The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.
-- Georg Brandes

#Men #Culture #Burden

Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.
-- Georg Brandes

#Men #Errors #Names

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
-- Georg Brandes

#Public Opinion #Opinion #Indolence

[Nietzsche] attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease hi his presence
-- Georg Brandes

#Lying #Ease #Vivid

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.
-- Georg Brandes

#Greatness #Results

Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Søren Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.
-- Georg Brandes

#Giving #Goal #Trying

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools
-- Georg Brandes

#Personality #Tools #Three

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.
-- Georg Brandes

#Glee #Danish #Cheerfulness

Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school.
-- Georg Brandes

#School #Home #Discipline

On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not.
-- Georg Brandes

#Friendly #World

I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.
-- Georg Brandes

#Home #World #Figures

The loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed his subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.
-- Georg Brandes

#Spring #Long #Loathing

Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
-- Georg Brandes

#Space #Envy #Hatred

What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity
-- Georg Brandes

#Real #Men #Animal

Those [Christians] had left to love on earth were then: brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called then: brothers and sisters in love.
-- Georg Brandes

#Christian #Brother #Hatred

What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction
-- Georg Brandes

#Humility #Names #Self

Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.
-- Georg Brandes

#Punishment #Medicine #Guilt

Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.
-- Georg Brandes

#Race #Effort #Trying

But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. ... We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.
-- Georg Brandes

#Powerful #Voice #Creating

[Nietzsche inveighs] against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks.
-- Georg Brandes

#Believe #Optimism #Greek

The crowd will follow a leader who marches twenty paces ahead of them, but if he is a thousand paces ahead of them, they will neither see nor follow him.
-- Georg Brandes

#Leadership #Twenties #Pace

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.
-- Georg Brandes

#Running #Father #People

It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.
-- Georg Brandes

#Mother #Difficult #Please

Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.
-- Georg Brandes

#Children #House #Birth

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.
-- Georg Brandes

#Lying #Compassion #Humanity

The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.
-- Georg Brandes

#Attention #Headmasters #Persons

Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.
-- Georg Brandes

#Brother #Real #Taken

School is a foretaste of life.
-- Georg Brandes

#School #School Life

When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.
-- Georg Brandes

#Boys #Littles #Trouble

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.
-- Georg Brandes

#Years #Circles #Lost Friendship

The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity....
-- Georg Brandes

#Truth #Errors #Humanity

I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.
-- Georg Brandes

#Two #World #Months

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
-- Georg Brandes

#Morality #Slave #Pariahs

It is useless to send armies against ideas.
-- Georg Brandes

#Army #Ideas #Useless

The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.
-- Georg Brandes

#War #Liberty

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.
-- Georg Brandes

#Summer #Picnics #Woods

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me.
-- Georg Brandes

#Feelings #Mind

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year.
-- Georg Brandes

#Inspiration #Years #Study

I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light.
-- Georg Brandes

#Light #Given #Rosy

I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.
-- Georg Brandes

#Hearing #Pale

I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one's feeling of honour.
-- Georg Brandes

#Feelings #Overcoming #Not Afraid

Being gifted needs courage.
-- Georg Brandes

#Needs #Gifted

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.
-- Georg Brandes

#Hygiene #Literature #Way

It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.
-- Georg Brandes

#Country #Pigs #Play

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.
-- Georg Brandes

#Children #Animal #Air

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.
-- Georg Brandes

#Doubt #Overcoming #Madness

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.
-- Georg Brandes

#Strong #Years #Fundamentals

I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.
-- Georg Brandes

#Dancer

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.
-- Georg Brandes

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.
-- Georg Brandes

#Doe #Danish #Jokes

I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
-- Georg Brandes

#Kindness #Brutality #Goodness