Constantin Brunner

The usual judgments are judgments of interest and they tell us less about the nature of the person judged than about the interest of the one who judges.

— Constantin Brunner

Men are forever doing two things at the same time: acting egoistically and talking moralistically.

— Constantin Brunner

Christ, with whom the multitude could not deal other than by making him into God Himself, thus enabling itself to venerate as God him whom they had loathed as man.

— Constantin Brunner

Great, strong, spiritual love — which is always at the same time a genuine, unsentimental love of man — cannot be without wrath. … Anger can no more be separated from love than flame and heat can from fire. Love and anger are a single fire of the Spirit.

— Constantin Brunner

From the midst of the flat plain of human reason, there arises the terrible, fire-spewing mountain of genius.

— Constantin Brunner

Christ … made the blood of the specialists and leading spirits, the representatives of the people boil with his battle-cry: "I", "I", "I"! and provoked the enraged counterblast: We, We, We!

— Constantin Brunner

And so, from this day forth, we want all the more to let our thoughts revolve around and hover over Socrates and Christ at all times, openly taking pride that they are more alive for us than all those living today and that we listen to and love them as we do none of the living.

— Constantin Brunner

Socrates and Christ speak to us everlastingly of mankind. … It belongs to the great, to the greatest men to say how things are with mankind, how they stand in its innerness and which way it is going; it belongs to Socrates and Christ. These absolutely extraordinary, eternally alive people penetrate to the groundless depth of human nature and understand the speech of ordinary people, of those who are scarcely alive from one day to the next.

— Constantin Brunner