Georg Brandes quotes

Georg Brandes was a Danish literary critic and scholar, recognized for his influence on European literature. His advocacy for realism and the Modern Breakthrough movement inspired major writers across Scandinavia and beyond. He played a crucial role in shaping modern thought and intellectual debate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here are 74 of his quotes:

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

Georg Brandes

Being gifted needs courage.

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

Georg Brandes

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.

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

Georg Brandes

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.

Georg Brandes

Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.

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

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

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes

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.

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

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

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

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

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes

School is a foretaste of life.

Georg Brandes

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

Georg Brandes