Henrik Ibsen Quotes - Page 4

To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.

I have other duties equally sacred ... Duties to myself.

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.

Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.

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.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

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.

It's such sport with these heroes of finance: they are like beads on a string — when one slips off, all the rest follow.

There is nothing so enervating and exhausting as this hopeless waiting. I dare say this is only a transition period. I will and shall have a victory some day. If the powers that be have shown me so little favor as to place me in this world and make me what I am, the result must be accordingly.

It is no use lying to one's self.

If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.

A thousand words can't make the mark a single deed will leave.

Nobody can put a character on paper without - at any rate in part and at times - sitting as a model for it himself.

Oh yes, right—right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?

I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

In the decisive moment I won the victory over myself. I chose to live. And believe me, it takes courage to choose life under those circumstances.

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

It is not for a care-free existence I am fighting, but for the possibility of devoting myself to the task which I believe and know has been laid upon me by God -- the work which seems to me more important and needful in Norway than any other, that of arousing the nation and leading it to think great thoughts.

Whether I pound or am being pounded, all the same there will be moaning!

The majority never has right on its side.

The old terms must be invented with new meaning and given new explanations. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer what they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand; and that is why I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions- external revolutions, political revolutions, etc. But that is only dabbling. What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit.

Marriage is something you have to give your whole mind to.

I'm inclined to think we are all ghosts-every one of us. It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. Its all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that.