Constantin Brunner Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Men are forever doing two things at the same time: acting egoistically and talking moralistically.

Constantin Brunner
The usual judgments are judgments of interest and they tell us less about the nature of the person judged than about the interest of the one who judges.

Constantin Brunner
Socrates and Christ speak to us everlastingly of mankind. … It belongs to the great, to the greatest men to say how things are with mankind, how they stand in its innerness and which way it is going; it belongs to Socrates and Christ. These absolutely extraordinary, eternally alive people penetrate to the groundless depth of human nature and understand the speech of ordinary people, of those who are scarcely alive from one day to the next.

Constantin Brunner
From the midst of the flat plain of human reason, there arises the terrible, fire-spewing mountain of genius.

Constantin Brunner
Christ … made the blood of the specialists and leading spirits, the representatives of the people boil with his battle-cry: "I", "I", "I"! and provoked the enraged counterblast: We, We, We!

Constantin Brunner
And so, from this day forth, we want all the more to let our thoughts revolve around and hover over Socrates and Christ at all times, openly taking pride that they are more alive for us than all those living today and that we listen to and love them as we do none of the living.

Constantin Brunner
Great, strong, spiritual love — which is always at the same time a genuine, unsentimental love of man — cannot be without wrath. … Anger can no more be separated from love than flame and heat can from fire. Love and anger are a single fire of the Spirit.

Constantin Brunner
In mysticism, everything is thrown at us directly, without discursiveness and ratiocination, as if it were a matter of course, and we are challenged to follow an unrestrainable will to love, arising out of a tremendously agitated, indiscriminate feeling. … Mystics will—rather than know—their thoughts. … Mysticism witnesses nothing but love; mysticism is nothing but love. … Art shows how it loves, philosophy what it loves; mysticism knows only that it loves.

Constantin Brunner
Christ, with whom the multitude could not deal other than by making him into God Himself, thus enabling itself to venerate as God him whom they had loathed as man.

Constantin Brunner