Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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Really to sin you have to be serious about it.
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Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves.
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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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It is no use lying to one's self.
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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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Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.
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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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What's a man's first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
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The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions to destroy.
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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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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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If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
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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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Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.
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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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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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Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
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It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
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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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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.