Georg Brandes
Georg Brandes
Georg Brandes, born Morris Cohen, was a Danish critic and scholar who greatly influenced Scandinavian and European literature from the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century. He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Breakthrough" of Scandinavian culture. At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and also fantasy in literature. His literary goals were shared by some other authors, among them the Norwegian "realist" playwright Henrik...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth4 February 1842
CountryDenmark
About the same time as my legal studies were thus beginning, I planned out a study of Philosophy and Aesthetics on a large scale as well.
I had an exceedingly keen eye for the ridiculous, and easily influenced as I still was, I could not content myself with a smile.
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.
It appears to [Nietzsche] that the modern age has produced for imitation three types of man ... First, Rousseau's man, the Titan who raises himself ... and in his need calls upon holy nature. Then Goethe's man ... a spectator of the world ... [Third] Schopenhauer's man ... voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth.
The educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
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.
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.
What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
[Nietzsche] attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease hi his presence
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.
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.
It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.