Georg Brandes

“ I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which may have been very useful in taming brutes, causes more misery to mankind than even the Church has done. Church, monarchy, marriage, property, these are to my mind four old venerable institutions which mankind will have to reform from the foundations in order to be able to breathe freely. And of these marriage alone kills the individuality, paralyses liberty and is the embodiment of a paradox. But the shocking thing about it is that humanity is still too coarse to be able to shake it off. ”

“ A book that is bright in its joy of life, dark in its riddles, a book for spiritual mountain-climbers and dare-devils and for the few who are practised in the great contempt of man that loathes the crowd, and in the great love of man that only loathes so deeply because it has a vision of a higher, braver humanity, which it seeks to rear and train. ”

“ In the last period of his life Nietzsche appeared rather as a prophet than as a thinker. He predicts the Superman. And he makes no attempt at logical proof, but proceeds from a reliance on the correctness and sureness of his instinct, convinced that he himself represents a life-promoting principle and his opponents one hostile to life.
To him the object of existence is, everywhere the production of genius. The higher man in our day is like a vessel in which the future of the race is fermenting in an impenetrable way, and more than one of these vessels is burst or broken in the process. ”

“ What kind of a nature is it that carries this savage hatred of philistinism even as far as to David Strauss? An artist's nature, obviously. What kind of a writer is it who warns us with such firm conviction against the dangers of historical culture? A philologist obviously, who has experienced them in himself, has felt himself threatened with becoming a mere aftermath and tempted to worship historical success. What kind of a nature is it that so passionately defines culture as the worship of genius? ”

“ His view is that what keeps the race from breathing freely and willing boldly is that it drags far too much of its past about with it, like a round-shot chained to a convict's leg. He thinks it is historical education that fetters the race both in enjoyment and in action, since he who cannot concentrate himself on the moment and live entirely in it, can neither feel happiness himself nor do anything to make others happy. Without the power of feeling unhistorically, there is no happiness. And in the same way, forgetfulness, or rather, non-knowledge of the past is essential to all action. ”

“ The inner suffering was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out. Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, staring—in spite of Job—at guilt as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More pain! More pain!" ”

“ For the dissatisfied and the unsuccessful as a rule avenge themselves on others. They absorb poison from everything, from their own incompetence as well as from their poor circumstances, and they live in a constant craving for revenge on those in whose nature they suspect harmony. Such people ever have virtuous precepts on their lips; the whole jingle of morality, seriousness, chastity, the claims of life; and their hearts ever bum with envy of those who have become well balanced and can therefore enjoy life.
For millenniums morality meant obedience to custom, respect for inherited usage. ”

“ Ibsen and Nietzsche were both solitary, even if they were not at all careless as to the fate of their works. It is the strongest man, says Dr. Stockmann, who is most isolated. Who was most isolated, Ibsen or Nietzsche? Ibsen, who held back from every alliance with others, but exposed his work to the masses of the theatre-going public, or Nietzsche, who stood alone as a thinker but as a man continually—even if, as a rule, in vain—spied after the like-minded and after heralds, and whose works, in the time of his conscious life, remained unread by the great public, or in any case misunderstood. ”

“ All the past is at man's mercy. But, this being so, it might happen that the rabble became master and drowned all time in its shallow waters, or that a tyrant usurped it all. Therefore we need a new nobility, to be the adversary of all rabble and all tyranny, and to inscribe on new tables the word "noble." Certainly not a nobility that can be bought, nor a nobility whose virtue is love of country. No, teaches Zarathustra, exiles shall ye be from your fatherlands and forefatherlands. Not the land of your fathers shall ye love, but your children's land. ”

“ My essay on "Aristocratic Radicalism" was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries. This thinker, then almost unknown and seldom mentioned, became, a few years later, the fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and this while the great man, to whose lot had suddenly fallen the universal fame he had so passionately desired, lived on without a suspicion of it all, a living corpse cut off from the world by incurable insanity. ”

“ My publisher telegraphed to me yesterday that the books had gone to you. I will spare you and myself the story of why they were delayed. Now, my dear Sir, may you put a good face on a bad bargain, I mean on this Nietzsche literature.
I myself cherish the notion of having given the "new Germans" the richest, most actual and most independent books of any they possess; also of being in my own person a capital event in the crisis of the determination of values. But this may be an error; and, what is more, a piece of foolishness—I do not want to have to believe anything [of the sort] about myself. ”

“ But greatness has nothing to do with results or with success. Demosthenes, who spoke in vain, is greater than Philip, who was always victorious. Everything in our day is thought to be in order, if only it be an accomplished fact; even when a man of genius dies in the fulness of his powers, proofs are forthcoming that he died at the right time. And the fragment of history we possess is entitled "the world process"; men cudgel their brains, like Eduard von Hartmann, in trying to find out its origin and final goal—which seems to be a waste of time. ”

“ Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction; God chastens whom he loves. Or it became a preparation, a trial and a training; even more—something that will one day be made good with interest, paid back in bliss. And the vilest underground creatures, swollen with hate and spite, were heard to say: We, the good, we are the righteous. ”

“ For upon this relation depend the fundamental idea of culture and the duties culture imposes. It imposes on me the duty of associating myself by my own activity with the great human ideals. Its fundamental idea is this: it assigns to every individual who wishes to work for it and participate in it, the task of striving to produce, within and without himself, the thinker and artist, the lover of truth and beauty, the pure and good personality, and thereby striving for the perfection of Nature, towards the goal of a perfected Nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ History, in his 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 milleniums, could not stand clearly and vividly before me. When one sees, that it only took about a hundred men to bring in the culture of the Renaissance; it may easily be supposed, for example, that a hundred productive minds, trained in a new style, would be enough to make an end of Culture-Philistinism. ”

“ To be able to explain Nietzsche's rapid and overwhelming triumph, one would want the key to the secret of the psychological life of our time. He bewitched the age, though he seems opposed to all its instincts. The age is ultra-democratic; he won its favour as an aristocrat. The age is borne on a rising wave of religious reaction; he conquered with his pronounced irreligion. The age is struggling with social questions of the most difficult and far-reaching kind; he, the thinker of the age, left all these questions on one side as of secondary importance. ”

“ The infliction of an injury, forcible subjection, exploitation or annihilation is not in itself a wrong, cannot be such, since life in its essence, in its primary functions, is nothing but oppression, exploitation and annihilation. Conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, that is, as limitations of the real desire of life, the object of which is power.
Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's Will to Life and Darwin's Struggle for Existence by the Will to Power. In his view the fight is not for life—bare existence—but for power. ”

“ But when Zarathustra tries to drive out the cowardly devils in men, the cry is raised against him, "Zarathustra is godless."
He is lonely, for all his former companions have become apostates; their young hearts have grown old, and not old even, only weary and slothful, only commonplace—and this they call becoming pious again. "Around light and liberty they once fluttered like gnats and young poets, and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles." They have understood their age. ”

“ When, for example, the vulgar mob has appropriated or adapted to its needs some religious idea, has defended it stubbornly and dragged it along for centuries, then the originator of that idea is called great. There is the testimony of thousands of years for it, we are told. But—this is Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's idea—the noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder's greatness rather than for it. ”

“ The feeling of owing a debt to the deity steadily grew through the centuries, until the recognition of the Christian deity as universal god brought about the greatest possible outburst of guilty feeling. Only in our day is any noticeable diminution of this sense of guilt to be traced; but where the consciousness of sin reaches its culminating point, there the bad conscience eats its way like a cancer, till the sense of the impossibility of paying the debt—atoning for the sin—is supreme and with it is combined the idea of eternal punishment. ”

“ At the close of the third part of Zarathustra there is a chapter headed "The Second Dance Song." Dance, in Nietzsche's language, is always an expression for the lofty lightness of mind, which is exalted above the gravity of earth and above all stupid seriousness. This song, extremely remarkable in its language, is a good specimen of the style of the work, when it soars into its highest flights of poetry. Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her, flinging out all his wrath with life and all his love of life. ”

“ What is significant of Nietzsche is his love of fighting for its own sake, in contrast to the modern humanitarian view. To Nietzsche the greatness of a movement is to be measured by the sacrifices it demands. The hygiene which keeps alive millions of weak and useless beings who ought rather to die, is to him no true progress. A dead level of mediocre happiness assured to the largest possible majority of the miserable creatures we nowadays call men, would be to him no true progress. ”

“ Thus young artists are driven into galleries instead of out into nature, and are sent, with minds still unformed, to centres of art, where they lose courage. And in all its forms history may render men unfit for life; in its monumental form by evoking the illusion that there are such things as fixed, recurring historical conjunctions, so that what has once been possible is now, in entirely altered conditions, possible again; in its antiquarian form by awakening a feeling of piety for ancient, bygone things, which paralyses the man of action, who must always outrage some piety or other ”

“ Nor will any one who has a sense for the agreement between German music and German philosophy, an ear for the harmony between German music and German lyrical poetry, an eye for the merits and defects of German painting and sculpture, which are the outcome of the same fundamental tendency that is revealed in the whole intellectual and emotional life of Germany, be disposed in advance to deny Germany a homogeneous culture. More precarious will be the state of such smaller countries whose dependence on foreign nations has not unfrequently been a dependence raised to the second power. ”

“ On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him: "Become thyself! Be thyself!" he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it.
He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.
We had in Denmark a great man who with impressive force exhorted his contemporaries to become individuals. ”

“ The youthful books are of great value to me; they make it far easier to understand you; I am now leisurely ascending the steps that lead up to your intellect. With Zarathustra I began too precipitately. I prefer to advance upwards rather than to dive head first as though into a sea.
I knew Hillebrand's essay and read years ago some bitter attacks on the book about Strauss. I am grateful to you for the word culture-philistine; I had no idea it was yours. I take no offence at the criticism of Strauss, although I have feelings of piety for the old gentleman. ”