Georg Brandes Quotes

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

Being gifted needs courage.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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