Quotes from Georg Brandes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 not given to looking at life in a rosy light.

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

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.

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

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.

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

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

School is a foretaste of life.

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

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

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

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