Georg Brandes

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

“I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.”

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

“My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.”

“Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.”

“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.”

“School is a foretaste of life.”

“The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.”

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

“Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.”

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

“I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.”