Explore Quotes by Georg Brandes

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

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.

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

Being gifted needs courage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

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

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

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

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

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.

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