Georg Brandes: Quotes about men

Georg Brandes was Danish literature critic and scholar. Explore interesting quotes on men.

Georg Brandes: 80 quotes0 likes

“Nietzsche asks how it has come about that so prodigious a contradiction can exist as that between the lack of true culture and the self-satisfied belief in actually possessing the only true one and he finds the answer in the circumstance that a class of men has come to the front which no former century has known, and to which (in 1873) he gave the name of “Culture-Philistines.””

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 8

“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.”

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 10

“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.”

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 11

“When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.”

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 12

“History, in [Nietzsche’s] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men’s great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.”

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 17

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

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 10