Best 53 quotes of Georg Brandes on MyQuotes

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.

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.

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.

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

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

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

I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

[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

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.

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

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

School is a foretaste of life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.