Georg Brandes Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Nietzsche asks how it has come about that so prodigious a contradiction can exist as that between the lack of true culture and the self-satisfied belief in actually possessing the only true one and he finds the answer in the circumstance that a class of men has come to the front which no former century has known, and to which (in 1873) he gave the name of Culture-Philistines.

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

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

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

Georg Brandes
For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal's sin ; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism … In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him better.

Georg Brandes
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
He maintains that culture shows itself above all else in a unity of artistic style running through every expression of a nation's life. On the other hand, the fact of having learnt much and knowing much is, as he points out, neither a necessary means to culture nor a sign of culture; it accords remarkably well with barbarism, that is to say, with want of style or a motley hotchpotch of styles.

Georg Brandes
What has set the mass in motion for any length of time is then called great. It is given the name of a historical power. When, for example, the vulgar mob has appropriated or adapted to its needs some religious idea, has defended it stubbornly and dragged it along for centuries, then the originator of that idea is called great. There is the testimony of thousands of years for it, we are told. But this is Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's idea the noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder's greatness rather than for it.

Georg Brandes
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
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
It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georg Brandes
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
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
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
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
The oldest definition [of good] was this: the noble, the mightier, higher-placed and high-minded held themselves and their actions to be good of the first rank in contradistinction to everything low and low-minded. Noble, in the sense of the class-consciousness of a higher caste, is the primary concept from which develops good in the sense of spiritually aristocratic. The lowly are designated as bad (not evil). Bad does not acquire its unqualified depreciatory meaning till much later. In the mouth of the people it is a laudatory word; the German word schlecht is identical with schlicht (cf. schlechtweg and schlechterdings).

Georg Brandes