Georg Brandes Quotes

For the impious act begets more after it, like to the parent stock.

Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior.

As somebody once said, we're not punished for our sins, we're punished by them.

As we sin, so do we suffer

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

Many without punishment, none without sin.

We're not punished for our sins, lad. We're punished by them.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

Neither in the sky nor in mid-ocean, nor by entering into mountain clefts, nowhere in the world is there a place where one may escape from the results of evil deeds.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

Don't come crying to me if your homes are attacked. You will reap what you sow.

It is a sin to be a mocker.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

It must be the ultimate punishment, don't you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?

As soon as she (woman) begins to be ashamed of what she ought not, she will not be ashamed of what she ought.

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

There aren’t many sure things in life, but one thing I know for sure is that you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. You have to follow through on some things.

The right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

We bear the consequences for what we have done to ourselves, and for the sin that rules this world. Jesus forgave the thief, but he didn't take him down off the cross.