Top 40 Georg Brandes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Being gifted needs courage.”

— Georg Brandes

2. “It is useless to send armies against ideas.”

— Georg Brandes

3. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

4. “School is a foretaste of life.”

— Georg Brandes

5. “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

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

— Georg Brandes

7. “The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

10. “Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.”

— Georg Brandes

11. “Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.”

— Georg Brandes

12. “Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

14. “What is public opinion? It is private indolence.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

17. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

18. “The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.”

— Georg Brandes

19. “He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

21. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

23. “The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models.”

— Georg Brandes

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

28. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

29. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Georg Brandes

31. “I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.”

— Georg Brandes

32. “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

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

— Georg Brandes

34. “I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

39. “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.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

43. “The loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed his subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.”

— Georg Brandes

44. “Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.”

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

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

— Georg Brandes

47. “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

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

— Georg Brandes