“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.”

—  Georg Brandes

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 11-12

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It appears to [Nietzsche] that the modern age has produced for imitation three types of man … First, Rousseau’s man, th…" by Georg Brandes?
Georg Brandes photo
Georg Brandes40
Danish literature critic and scholar 1842–1927

Related quotes

“Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man.”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

Lesbian Nation, p. 190.

“For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 183.

Bert Williams photo

“The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortunes.”

Bert Williams (1874–1922) American comedian and actor

Bert Williams, The comic side of trouble, January 1918, American Magazine 85, 33-34, 58-60. Quoted in From traveling show to vaudeville: theatrical spectacle in America, 1830-1910, 2003, Robert M. Lewis, JHU Press, ISBN 0801870879.

Plato photo

“The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

Epictetus photo

“God hath introduced Man to be a spectator of Himself and of His works; and”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: But God hath introduced Man to be a spectator of Himself and of His works; and not a spectator only, but also an interpreter of them. Wherefore it is a shame for man to begin and to leave off where the brutes do. Rather he should begin there, and leave off where Nature leaves off in us: and that is at contemplation, and understanding, and a manner of life that is in harmony with herself. See then that ye die not without being spectators of these things. (13).

Peter L. Berger photo

“Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definite reality. Its limits are set by nature, but, once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 183 (1966); (1991; p. 208)

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Divinity College Address (1838)

William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher photo

“Where a man calls himself by a name which is not his name, he is telling a falsehood.”

William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher (1815–1899) British lawyer, judge and politician

Reddaway v. Banham (1895), L. R. 2 Q. B. D. [1895], p. 293.

Anaïs Nin photo

“The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Related topics