Top 25 Georg Brandes Quotes

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

Being gifted needs courage.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

School is a foretaste of life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.