Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as “the father of realism” and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll’s House became the world’s most performed play by the early 20th century.
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Rob the average man of his illusion and you rob him of his happiness at one stroke.
—Henrik Ibsen
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority
—Henrik Ibsen
Don’t use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.”
—Henrik Ibsen
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
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: Marriage
The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Experience
This is life! It can harden and it can exalt.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Money
Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Failures, Mistakes, Opportunity
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
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
A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Appreciation
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
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Society
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
Castles in the air – -they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Dreams
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
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
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Solitude, Self-Discovery
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
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
Marriage! Nothing else demands so much from a man!
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Religion
What’s a man’s first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Being Ourselves
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
—Henrik Ibsen
These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.
—Henrik Ibsen
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: Feminism, Women
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
Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Freedom
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Words
A forest bird never wants a cage.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Freedom
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
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
To seek one’s goals and to drive toward it, stealing one’s heart, is most uplifting.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Confidence
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: Marriage
A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.
—Henrik Ibsen
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
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom-they are the pillars of society.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Society, Truth
Marriage is a very sea of calls and claims, which have but little to do with love.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
Really to sin you have to be serious about it.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Sin
The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.
—Henrik Ibsen
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Science
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