Georg Brandes Quotes

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

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.

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.

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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

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

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

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 [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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.