Henrik Ibsen quotes - page 4

Take the saving lie from the average man and you take his happiness away, too. (Henrik Ibsen)
It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.
Henrik Ibsen
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
Henrik Ibsen
Mrs LINDE: When you've sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don't do it second time.
Henrik Ibsen
I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.
Henrik Ibsen
In your power, all the same. Subject to your will and your demands. No longer free No That's a thought I'll never endure Never.
Henrik Ibsen
I thank God that in the bath of Pain He purged my love.
Henrik Ibsen
Nothing shall part us, and our life shall prove A song of glory to triumphant love!
Henrik Ibsen
He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding.
Henrik Ibsen
Losing all was winning's cost! Eternally owned is but what's lost!
Henrik Ibsen
The State has its root in time, and will ripe and rot in time. (Henrik Ibsen)
That power which circumstances placed in my hands, and which is an emanation of divinity, I am conscious of having used to the best of my skill. I have never wittingly wronged any one.
Henrik Ibsen
Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is characteristic of the so-called State, and, as I have said, it is not a good characteristic.
Henrik Ibsen
Neither moral conceptions nor art-forms have an eternity before them. How much are we really in duty bound to pin our faith to? Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five?
Henrik Ibsen
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.
Henrik Ibsen
God bless thee, bride of my life's dawn, Where'er I be, to nobler deed thou'lt wake me.
Henrik Ibsen
Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. Undermine the whole conception of a State, declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty that is worth something.
Henrik Ibsen
The majority has might on its side-unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right-I and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right.
Henrik Ibsen
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.
Henrik Ibsen
I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as you are.
Henrik Ibsen
So to conduct one's life as to realize oneselfthis seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it. (Henrik Ibsen)
Oh, life would be all right if we didn't have to put up with these damned creditors who keep pestering us with the demands of their ideals.
Henrik Ibsen
Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your ''emancipation'.' You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood.
Henrik Ibsen
Rob the average man of his life-illusion and you rob him also of his happiness.
Henrik Ibsen
That power which circumstances placed in my hands, and which is an emanation of divinity, I am conscious of having used to the best of my skill. I have never wittingly wronged any one. For this campaign there were good and sufficient reasons; and if some should think that I have not fulfilled all expectations, they ought in justice to reflect that there is a mysterious power without us, which in a great measure governs the issue of human undertakings.
Henrik Ibsen