Georg Brandes > Quotes

“It is useless to send armies against ideas.”
― Georg Brandes

“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

“There are productive spirits who require many and great destinies or experience in order to produce a small work. There is a kind of poet who, from a hundred pounds of rose leaves, produces one drop of attar of roses. And on the other hand, there are talents whose nature is so fruitful, whose inner climate is so tropical, that from a quite plain everyday life situation, which they experience with the highest energy, they extract whole series of important works. They are like those treeless islands in the Pacific on which passengers from a passing ship leave some fruit-kernels, and which many years later are covered with mighty forests. Kierkegaard belonged to the latter kind.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard

“In this relationship he was, as odd as it sounds, the passive, the young girl the active force. He approached her; in a trice her nature fertilized his inner being. From that moment on he cannot but help it that she becomes unnecessary for his life.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard

“He is amazed that he longed so deeply for the young girl when she was not there, that he was really happier sitting alone and thinking about her than when she was there. He needed her not for loving her ... yes, sometimes it was as though her presence could be disturbing for him. He also wrote to her rather than spoke. He had lived far too inwardly, far too spiritually, for this sensual nearness not to be as though too much.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard

“He who possesses liberty otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless; for the idea of liberty has undoubtedly this characteristic, that it develops steadily during its assimilation. So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says: 'Now I have it' - thereby shows he has lost it. It is, however, exactly this dead maintenance of a certain given standpoint of liberty that is characteristic of communities which go by the name of states - and this it is that I have called worthless. Yes, to be sure, it is a benefit to possess the franchise, the right of self-taxation, etc., but for whom is it a benefit? For the citizen, not for the individual. Now there is absolutely no reasonable necessity for the individual to be a citizen. On the contrary - the state is the curse of the individual... The state must be abolished! In that revolution I will take part.”
― Georg Brandes, Main Currents In Nineteenth Century Literature, Volume 4