Georg Brandes Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

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

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

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.

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

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

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

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

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

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

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

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

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

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

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

School is a foretaste of life.

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.