Georg Brandes Quotes
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I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one's feeling of honour.
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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.
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I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light.
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It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.
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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.
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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
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I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.
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What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
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The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.
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Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.
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I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.
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The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.
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The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.
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That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.
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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.
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I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.
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Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.
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The crowd will follow a leader who marches twenty steps in advance; but if he is a thousand steps in front of them, they do not see and do not follow him, and any literary freebooter who chooses may shoot him with impunity.
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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.
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Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Søren Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.
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The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.
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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
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The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.
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When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.