Henrik Ibsen Quotes

Helmer: To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don‘t consider what people will say!

Nora: I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary
for me.

Helmer: It‘s shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.

Nora: What do you consider my most sacred duties?

Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?

Nora: I have other duties just as sacred.

Helmer: That you have not. What duties could those be?

Nora: Duties to myself.

Helmer: Before all else, you are a wife and mother.

Nora: I don‘t believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are — or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.

first condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence of marriage.

oh, that was a terrible time for me, I can tell you. I kept the blinds drawn down over both my windows. When I peeped out, I saw the sun shining as if nothing had happened. I could not understand it. I saw people going along the street, laughing and talking about indifferent things. I could not understand it. It seemed to me that the whole of existence must be at a standstill — as if under an eclipse.

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.

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.-

Torvald: I would gladly work night and day for you, Nora — bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honour for the one he loves.
Nora: But hundreds of thousands of women have done!

But he got right to the top. And I heard harps in the air. My - my master builder!

A man who has the inventive genius can't control it exactly as he wishes. Its working depends in great measure on inspiration — on a momentary suggestion — and it is almost impossible to tell beforehand at what moment it will come.

en bruger brændevin, en anden bruger løgne; å ja! så brugte vi eventyr om prinser og trolde og allslags dyr

When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.

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

No, I don't think one ought to be at everybody's beck and call. Anyway, I'm not going to be.

Because there is surely nothing in the world that can compare with happiness of forgiveness and of lifting up a guilty sinner in the arms of love.

A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years — seldom longer.

A woman cannot be herself in modern society,” he argues, since it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.