Henrik Ibsen Quotes

Jeg har lest på trykk - og satsen er sann -
«ingen blir profet i sitt eget land».

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

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

To be oneself on a basis of gold
is no better than founding one’s house on the sand.
For your watch, and your ring, and the rest of your trappings
the good people fawn on you, grovelling to earth;
they lift their hats to your jewelled breast-pin;
but your ring and your breast-pin are not your person.-

HELMER: But this is disgraceful. Is this the way you neglect your most sacred duties?

NORA: What do you consider is my most sacred duty?

HELMER: Do I have to tell you that? Isn't it your duty to your husband and children?

NORA: I have another duty, just as sacred.

HELMER: You can't have. What duty do you mean?

NORA: My duty to myself.

I don't know whether you find also in your part of the world that there are certain people who go zealously snuffing about to smell out moral corruption, and, as soon as they have found some, put the person concerned into some lucrative position where they can keep their eye on him. Healthy natures are left out in the cold.

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

"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."

However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased..

People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind.

Our common lust for life.

You don't get nothing for nothing in this life.

He is suffering from an acute attack of integrity.

Brand: Answer me, God, in the jaws of death:
Is there no salvation for the Will of Man?
No small measure of salvation?
[The avalanche buries him. The valley is swallowed up.]
A Voice: [Calls through the crashing thunder] He is the God of Love.

A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.