Henrik Ibsen Quotes

It's a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act that has something of unconditional beauty.

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…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.

It’s a release to know that in spite of everything a premeditated act of courage is still possible.

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of
iron or of gold.

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

When I lost you, it was as if all the solid ground dissolved from under my feet. Look at me; I'm a half-drowned man now, hanging onto a wreck.

One's life is a heavy price to pay for being born.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney ...

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.

Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.

Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

Oh, yes — you
can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has
might on its side — unfortunately; but right it has not.

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