Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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Helmer: "Before all else you are a wife and a mother." Nora: "That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being."
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Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself -- thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.
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What ought a man be? Well, my short answer is 'himself'.
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One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
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Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.
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If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
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There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.
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Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.
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Oh yes, right—right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?
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I believe that, before all else, I'm a human being, no less than you.
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I go to scale the Future's possibilities! Farewell!
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The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority.
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I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.
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Marriage! Nothing else demands so much of a man.
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Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.
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The starving poet business is no good nowadays.
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Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.
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Everything that I have written is closely related to something that I have lived through.
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You don't get nothing for nothing in this life.