Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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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.
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It is no use lying to one's self.
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...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.
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The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
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Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.
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A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.
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I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.
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This is life! It can harden and it can exalt!
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Whether I pound or am being pounded, all the same there will be moaning!
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Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
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The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions to destroy.
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What's a man's first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
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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.
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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.
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Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, life would be all right if we didn't have to put up with these damned creditors who keep pestering us with the demands of their ideals.
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If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
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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.
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Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.
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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 sand of the sea.... We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
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To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.
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Happiness is worth a daring deed; we are both free if we but will it, and then the game is won.