Henrik Ibsen Quotes
-
To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind.
-
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.
-
Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
-
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.
-
That is the accursed thing about small surroundings -- they make the soul small.
-
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
-
A forest bird never wants a cage.
-
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
-
The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.
-
Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.
-
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.
-
I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
-
The majority never has right on its side.
-
The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.
-
To live is to war with trolls.
-
Oh, one soon makes friends with invalids; and I need so much to have someone to live for.
-
I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority.
-
Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.
-
It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.