Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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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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Happiness is worth a daring deed; we are both free if we but will it, and then the game is won.
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That is the accursed thing about small surroundings -- they make the soul small.
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There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart.
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I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
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To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind.
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A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
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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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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.
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The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.
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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.
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If only I could master that demon of procrastination that goes about like a roaring lion and devours all my good intentions, I should become the most punctual man in the world.
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Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.
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The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.
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A forest bird never wants a cage.
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The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.
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To live is to war with trolls.
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Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.
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The majority never has right on its side.
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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.
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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.
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I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority.
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Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
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One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.