Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright. He is regarded as one Europe’s most distinguished playwrights and is commonly referred to as the “father of modern prose drama.”
Born to an affluent timber merchant family in Skien, Norway, Ibsen’s family’s finances collapsed when he was eight. After friends and relatives walked out on the family, Ibsen’s father became depressed, and his mother sought comfort in religion. Henrik had an introverted childhood and left home at age sixteen. He took to writing drama, and producing and directing plays to provide for an illegitimate child he had with a young housekeeper.
Disappointed by the lack of success of many of his early plays, Ibsen left Norway at age 36. He moved to Italy and felt that he had “escaped from darkness into light.” With his newfound productive energy, he composed two well-known plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) that brought him worldwide fame. In 1868, he moved to Germany and wrote The Emperor and Galilean (1873,) which he considered his leading literary work, and Pillars of Society (1877.)
Ibsen’s most well-known work is Doll’s House (1879.) It attracted great fame and controversy because of its criticism of 19th century marriage norms. Doll’s House features the marital life of socially-reputable, indulged wife Nora Helmer. She eventually senses her isolation and suppression in her cage-like home. She feels entrapped in her marriage, in which her affluence has been purchased by the deprivation of her true identity. She declines to submit to her husband’s desire and walks out from a seemingly perfect marriage symbolized by a “doll’s house.” In addition, Ibsen strayed from the conventional narrative style by ending Doll’s House with a discussion and not an unraveling. Doll’s House is regarded as one of the foremost works of the Naturalism literary movement that represented middle-class life in real, everyday circumstances. Making a spectator feel “as if he were actually sitting, listening, and looking at events happening in real life” was a departure from the Romanticism and Surrealism literary styles that featured idealistic themes.
Ibsen attracted further controversy and infuriated Europe’s social authorities through his severe criticisms of 19th century morality and social norms in Ghosts (1881,) An Enemy of the People (1882,) and The Wild Duck (1884.) His later works, Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892,) featured the deliberations of introspective characters.
Ibsen returned to Norway after 27 years of self-imposed exile as a renowned iconoclast and a celebrated playwright. He died in Oslo at age 79.
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A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there’s no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it’s an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
—Henrik Ibsen
I’m afraid for all those who’ll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Capitalism
The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Experience
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Health
If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Confidence
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Democracy
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Society
Marriage is a very sea of calls and claims, which have but little to do with love.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.
—Henrik Ibsen
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness: this great unpardonable sin is the murder of the “love-life” in a human being.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Love
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Appreciation
This is life! It can harden and it can exalt.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority
—Henrik Ibsen
These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.
—Henrik Ibsen
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Words
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Self-reliance, Solitude, Self-Discovery
Really to sin you have to be serious about it.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Sin
What in fact have I achieved, however much it may seem? Bits and pieces trivialities. But here they won’t tolerate anything else, or anything more. If I wanted to take one step in advance of the current views and opinions of the day, that would put paid to any power I have. Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Accomplishment
Everything which I have created as a poet has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Writing
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Women, Feminism
What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that ‘walks in us.’ There are all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no tangibility, but they haunt us all the same and we can not get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea.
—Henrik Ibsen
Different people have different duties assigned to them by Nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Success, Nature
Marriage! Nothing else demands so much from a man!
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
What’s a man’s first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Being Ourselves
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Science, Experiment
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Religion
Don’t use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.”
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Idealism
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom-they are the pillars of society.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Truth, Society
I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority
—Henrik Ibsen
In your power, all the same. Subject to your will and your demands. No longer free! No! That’s a thought I’ll never endure! Never.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Wives, Marriage
Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Freedom
The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitutes the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.
—Henrik Ibsen
To seek one’s goals and to drive toward it, stealing one’s heart, is most uplifting.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Opportunity, Failures, Mistakes
Rob the average man of his illusion and you rob him of his happiness at one stroke.
—Henrik Ibsen
The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.
—Henrik Ibsen
It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.
—Henrik Ibsen
Castles in the air – -they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Dreams
In that second it dawned on me that I had been living here for eight years with a strange man and had borne him three children.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Wives, Marriage
A forest bird never wants a cage.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Freedom, Birds
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