Henrik Ibsen Quotes

it was a tremendous pleasure to sit there working and earning money. It was like being a man.

What ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is ‘himself’.

Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.

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.

Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment.

Nora: It's true Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion. If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it. He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house -

Helmer: That's no way to talk about our marriage!

Nora [undisturbed]: I mean when I passed out of Papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything to suit your own tastes, and so I came to have the same tastes as yours.. or I pretended to. I'm not quite sure which.. perhaps it was a bit of both — sometimes one and sometimes the other. Now that I come to look at it, I've lived here like a pauper — simply from hand to mouth. I've lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. That was how you wanted it. You and Papa have committed a grievous sin against me: it's your fault that I've made nothing of my life.

I'm also like a half-drowned woman on a wreck. No one to suffer with; no one to care for.

"Don't use that exotic word "ideals". We have a good enough native word: "lies"."

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

What's to become of the morally sound? Left out in the cold, I suppose. We must heal the sick.

The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions — to destroy.

Ikke tusend ord
sig prenter, som én gernings spor.

To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?

HELMER: — To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! You don’t consider what the world will say.
NORA: — I can pay no heed to that. I only know what I must do.
HELMER: — It is exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this world?
NORA: — What do you call my holiest duties?
HELMER: — Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and your children.
NORA: — I have other duties equally sacred.
HELMER: — Impossible! What duties do you mean?
NORA: — My duties towards myself.
HELMER: — Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
NORA: — That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are — or at least I will try to become one.

You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.