Georg Brandes Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

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

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

Being gifted needs courage.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

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

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

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

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

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

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

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

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

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

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.

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.

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

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

School is a foretaste of life.

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

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

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