Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Henrik Ibsen - Page 2

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.

And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it!

Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.

Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.

The State is the curse of the individual... The State must go! That will be a revolution which will find me on its side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which will be something worth possessing.

The strongest men are the most alone.

Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.

Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.

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

Marriage is something you have to give your whole mind to.

A thousand words can't make the mark a single deed will leave.

It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will.

There is nothing so enervating and exhausting as this hopeless waiting. I dare say this is only a transition period. I will and shall have a victory some day. If the powers that be have shown me so little favor as to place me in this world and make me what I am, the result must be accordingly.

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

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.

A friend married is a friend lost.

The starving poet business is no good nowadays.

Each bird must sing with his own throat.

Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing

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

This is life! It can harden and it can exalt!

Marriage! Nothing else demands so much of a man

Different people have different duties assigned them by Nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.

To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?

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

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

I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.

The sea possesses a power over one's moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.

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.

It is not for a care-free existence I am fighting, but for the possibility of devoting myself to the task which I believe and know has been laid upon me by God -- the work which seems to me more important and needful in Norway than any other, that of arousing the nation and leading it to think great thoughts.

If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.

Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.

Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.

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.

To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.

So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.

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.

The majority never has right on its side.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.

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?

The old terms must be invented with new meaning and given new explanations. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer what they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand; and that is why I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions- external revolutions, political revolutions, etc. But that is only dabbling. What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit.

Nobody can put a character on paper without - at any rate in part and at times - sitting as a model for it himself.

It is no use lying to one's self.

In the decisive moment I won the victory over myself. I chose to live. And believe me, it takes courage to choose life under those circumstances.

Helmer: "Before all else you are a wife and a mother." Nora: "That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being."

What ought a man be? Well, my short answer is 'himself'.

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

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.

Whether I pound or am being pounded, all the same there will be moaning!

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

I have other duties equally sacred ... Duties to myself.

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

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

It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.

When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.

I'm inclined to think we are all ghosts-every one of us. It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. Its all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.