Henrik Ibsen Quotes

It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life

I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.

You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.

A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.

To live is to war with trolls.

You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.

I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?

Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves. Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.

HELMER: But this is disgraceful. Is this the way you neglect your most sacred duties? NORA: What do you consider is my most sacred duty? HELMER: Do I have to tell you that? Isn't it your duty to your husband and children? NORA: I have another duty, just as sacred. HELMER: You can't have. What duty do you mean? NORA: My duty to myself.

I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.

What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?

But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves." "It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.

NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I'm to get to know myself and the world outside. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer.

Mrs LINDE: When you've sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don't do it second time.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing

It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority

With me you could have been another person.

Don't use that exotic word "ideals". We have a good enough native word: "lies".

I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.

It's a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act that has something of unconditional beauty.

It’s a release to know that in spite of everything a premeditated act of courage is still possible.

Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees like a dog? It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold.

When I lost you, it was as if all the solid ground dissolved from under my feet. Look at me; I'm a half-drowned man now, hanging onto a wreck.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

One's life is a heavy price to pay for being born.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney ...

Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.

Oh, yes--you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side--unfortunately; but right it has not.

There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

I'm also like a half-drowned woman on a wreck. No one to suffer with; no one to care for.

I'll risk everything together with you.

To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind

Anyone who's sold herself for somebody else once isn't going to do it again.

Oh yes, right—right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?

There are people one loves and others one likes to talk to

Haven't you ever noticed, Hilde, how seductive, how inviting . . . the impossible is?

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me light glinting on broken glass.

How can I hold you close enough?

What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up. And if a truth is as old as that, it is also in a fair way to become a lie, gentlemen.

Happiness is worth a daring deed; we are both free if we but will it, and then the game is won.

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen. Henrik Ibsen,

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you - or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which - I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.

But a scientific man must live in a little bit of style.

A talent for building children's souls, Hilde. So building their souls that they might grow straight and fine, nobly and beautifully formed, to their full human stature. That was where Aline's talent lay.

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Results for "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians

[From below comes the noise of a door slamming.]

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth, Author

The idol of Authority must be shattered in this town.

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

To think it, wish it, even want it — but do it! No, that I cannot understand.

Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.

The forests avenge themselves.

You have made an empty place within me; and I must try to fill it up with something—with something that is a little like love.

It is the small losses in life that cut one to the heart.

I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is. ... When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events if it is true for me.

Først når vi døde våkner, ser vi det uopprettelige, nemlig at vi aldri har levet.

El hombre más poderoso del mundo es el que está más solo

She was an extraordinary person too! Would you believe it, she cut her hair short, and used to go about in men’s boots in bad weather

Men are funny characters, they must always have something to bemuse them.

I thought you understood where I'd lost what you call my heart at the time.

Nora: It's true Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion. If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it. He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house - Helmer: That's no way to talk about our marriage! Nora [undisturbed]: I mean when I passed out of Papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything to suit your own tastes, and so I came to have the same tastes as yours.. or I pretended to. I'm not quite sure which.. perhaps it was a bit of both -- sometimes one and sometimes the other. Now that I come to look at it, I've lived here like a pauper -- simply from hand to mouth. I've lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. That was how you wanted it. You and Papa have committed a grievous sin against me: it's your fault that I've made nothing of my life.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

Nora: Torvald, don't look at me like that! Torvald: Can't I look at my richest treasure? At all that beauty that's mine, mine alone-completely and utterly.

Sjel, vær trofast til det siste! Seirens seir er alt å miste. Tapets alt din vinning skapte; - evig eies kun det tapte.

This longing to commit a madness stays with us throughout our lives. Who has not, when standing with someone by an abyss or high up on a tower, had a sudden impulse to push the other over? And how is it that we hurt those we love although we know that remorse will follow? Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves. To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. —Henrik Ibsen

A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.

Tar de livsløgnen fra et gjennomsnittsmenneske, så tar du lykken ifra ham med det samme

However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased..

Good god, people don't do such things!

The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don't have any power?

HELMER:—To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! You don’t consider what the world will say. NORA:—I can pay no heed to that. I only know what I must do. HELMER:—It is exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this world? NORA:—What do you call my holiest duties? HELMER:—Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and your children. NORA:—I have other duties equally sacred. HELMER:—Impossible! What duties do you mean? NORA:—My duties towards myself. HELMER:—Before all else you are a wife and a mother. NORA:—That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are—or at least I will try to become one.

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

He is suffering from an acute attack of integrity.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Dr. Stockmann. I have already told you that what I want to speak about is the great discovery I have made lately--the discovery that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the hole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.

first condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence of marriage.

en bruger brændevin, en anden bruger løgne; å ja! så brugte vi eventyr om prinser og trolde og allslags dyr

A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years—seldom longer.

That's pretty amazing, the countries thing," I said. "Yeah, everybody's got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?" "Urn, I know a lot of people's last words." It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations. "Example?" "I like Henrik Ibsen's. He was a playwright." I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I'd never read any of his plays. I didn't like reading plays. I liked reading biographies. "Yeah, I know who he was," said Chip. "Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning/ and Ibsen looked at her and said, `On the contrary,' and then he died." Chip laughed. "That's morbid. But I like it.

You are a murderer! You have committed the one mortal sin! You have killed the love-life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.

To be oneself on a basis of gold is no better than founding one’s house on the sand. For your watch, and your ring, and the rest of your trappings the good people fawn on you, grovelling to earth; they lift their hats to your jewelled breast-pin; but your ring and your breast-pin are not your person.-

When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

oh, that was a terrible time for me, I can tell you. I kept the blinds drawn down over both my windows. When I peeped out, I saw the sun shining as if nothing had happened. I could not understand it. I saw people going along the street, laughing and talking about indifferent things. I could not understand it. It seemed to me that the whole of existence must be at a standstill -- as if under an eclipse.

Here in the north each night is a whole winter long. Yet the place is fair enough, doubt it not! Thou shalt see sights here such as thou hast not seen in the halls of the English king. We shall be together as sisters whilst thou bidest with me; we shall go down to the sea when the storm begins once more; thou shalt see the billows rushing upon the land like wild, white-maned horses—and then the whales far out in the offing! They dash one against another like steel-clad knights! Ha, what joy to be a witching-wife and ride on the whale's back—to speed before the skiff, and wake the storm, and lure men to the deeps with lovely songs of sorcery!

Helmer: To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don‘t consider what people will say! Nora: I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary for me. Helmer: It‘s shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties. Nora: What do you consider my most sacred duties? Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children? Nora: I have other duties just as sacred. Helmer: That you have not. What duties could those be? Nora: Duties to myself. Helmer: Before all else, you are a wife and mother. Nora: I don‘t believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are — or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.