Henrik Ibsen Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
-
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.
-
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
-
Happiness is worth a daring deed; we are both free if we but will it, and then the game is won.
-
Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.
-
That is the accursed thing about small surroundings -- they make the soul small.
-
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
-
Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your emancipation. You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields - discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West - superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood.
-
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 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.
-
A forest bird never wants a cage.
-
Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
-
To live is to war with trolls.
-
People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.
-
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.
-
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
-
Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.
-
There is always a risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there is more risk.