Top 30 Georg Brandes Quotes

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

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

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.

School is a foretaste of life.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

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

Being gifted needs courage.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

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

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.

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

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

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

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

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