Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
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To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind.
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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 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.
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The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.
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A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
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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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Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
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To live is to war with trolls.
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The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.
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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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The majority never has right on its side.
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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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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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Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.
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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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Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.
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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'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.
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One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
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The greatest victory is defeat.
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Oh, one soon makes friends with invalids; and I need so much to have someone to live for.