Quotes & Sayings About Ibsen

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself. — Henrik Ibsen

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong. — Henrik Ibsen

OSWALD: Is it very late, mother?
MRS. ALVING: It is early morning. [She looks out through the conservatory.] The day is dawning over the mountains. And the weather is clearing, Oswald. In a little while you shall see the sun.
OSWALD: I'm glad of that. Oh, I may still have much to rejoice in and live for-- — Henrik Ibsen

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

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. — Henrik Ibsen

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it ... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse. — Henrik Ibsen

It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life — Henrik Ibsen

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.. — Henrik Ibsen

The man-at-arms is the only man. — Henrik Ibsen

Really to sin you have to be serious about it. — Henrik Ibsen

I have had a delightfully lonely time of it - plenty of leisure to think and think about things. — Henrik Ibsen

The idol of Authority must be shattered in this town. — Henrik Ibsen

That's pretty amazing, the countries thing," I said.
"Yeah, everybody's got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?"
"Urn, I know a lot of people's last words." It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate;
I had dying declarations.
"Example?"
"I like Henrik Ibsen's. He was a playwright." I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I'd never read any of his plays. I didn't
like reading
plays. I liked reading biographies.
"Yeah, I know who he was," said Chip.
"Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him,
'You seem to be feeling better this morning/ and Ibsen looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he
died."
Chip laughed. "That's morbid. But I like it. — John Green

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.- — Henrik Ibsen

I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer. — Henrik Ibsen

Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, somethingyou can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places. — Minnie Maddern Fiske

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — Henrik Ibsen

OSWALD: [Repeats, in a dull, toneless voice.] The sun. The sun. — Henrik Ibsen

NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I'm to get to know myself and the world outside. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer. — Henrik Ibsen

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? — Henrik Ibsen

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom - these are the pillars of society. — Henrik Ibsen

Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness. — Henrik Ibsen

Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility will last in him? — Henrik Ibsen

It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will. — Henrik Ibsen

Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love"; but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter it blinded with love. — Henrik Ibsen

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. — Henrik Ibsen

Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical. — Henrik Ibsen

Happiness is worth a daring deed; we are both free if we but will it, and then the game is won. — Henrik Ibsen

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

That is the only relation in life that is not subject to the law of change. — Henrik Ibsen

I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority — Henrik Ibsen

There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — Henrik Ibsen

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

[Touching his own breast.] In here, you see - in here I have a little bramah-locked casket. And in that casket all my sculptor's visions are stored up. But when she disappeared and left no trace, the lock of the casket snapped to. And she had the key - and she took it away with her. - You, little Maia, you had no key; so all that the casket contains must lie unused. And the years pass! And I have no means of getting at the treasure. — Henrik Ibsen

But a scientific man must live in a little bit of style. — Henrik Ibsen

The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don't have any power? — Henrik Ibsen

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything. — Harold Bloom

Sonechka, meanwhile, placid soul that she was - cocooned by the thousand volumes of her reading, lulled by the hazy murmurings of the Greek myths, the hypnotically shrill recorder fluting of the Middle Ages, the misty windswept yearning of Ibsen, the minutely detailed tedium of Balzac, the astral music of Dante, the siren song of the piercing voices of Rilke and Novalis, seduced by the moralistic despair of the great Russian writers calling out to the heart of heaven itself - this placid soul had no awareness that her great moment was at hand. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

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

We are in danger, all of us, and I will give you an example why - a journalist I knew years ago. He was a good journalist. He went around the world and recorded what he saw and came to various conclusions. He said, Paris is this and London is that - and Greece is worth a couple of days. He felt two days was enough to give him an understanding of Greece. What that statement reveals is that the basis of our Western culture now, and of professional man, is middle-class. The middle class makes statements and knows nothing. You and I are the middle class and must think of ourselves as middle-class. We are middleclass actors, middle-class journalists, middle-class plumbers and morticians. The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. — Stella Adler

In great memories there lies the seed of growth. — Henrik Ibsen

Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves.
Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done. — Henrik Ibsen

About the white and shining milky way? Man may not there the milk of fortune skim, Nor is the butter of it meant for him. — Henrik Ibsen

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin. — Henrik Ibsen

It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's 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 can't get rid of them. — Henrik Ibsen

We will talk of this again, when the grass has first withered on her grave. Then you'll hear him spouting about "the child too early torn from her father's heart;" then you'll see him steep himself in a syrup of sentiment and self-admiration and self-pity. Just you wait! — Henrik Ibsen

There was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce - in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had forseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom had not been a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire. — George Orwell

Think, Dagny, what it is to sit by the window in the eventide and hear the kelpie wailing in the boat-house; to sit waiting and listening for the dead men's ride to Valhal; for their way lies past us here in the north. They are the brave men that fell in fight, the strong women that did not drag out their lives tamely, like thee and me; they sweep through the storm-night on their black horses, with jangling bells! Ha, Dagny! think of riding the last ride on so rare a steed! — Henrik Ibsen

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke. — Henrik Ibsen

For he did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror. He was a quiet, conventional person, and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen, too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for bicycles which was being taken up by women equally with men. Chips did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom. He had a vague notion, if he ever formulated it, that nice women were weak, timid, and delicate, and that nice men treated them with a polite but rather distant chivalry. — James Hilton

Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing — Henrik Ibsen

If Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' were alive today, he would recognize the ethic that has informed capitalist and communist countries alike - economic growth before public health and well-being. The true enemies of the people ar those who continue to sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term gains. But perhaps we should all look in the mirror. — Susannah York

You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — 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

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level. — John Logan

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

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. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — 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

To see one's goal and to drive toward it, steeling one's heart, is most uplifting. — Henrik Ibsen

MAIA. - all the glory of the world? Yes, you did. And all that glory should be mine, you said. — Henrik Ibsen

You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. — Henrik Ibsen

What ought a man be? Well, my short answer is 'himself'. — Henrik Ibsen

Nothing is impossible that one desires with an indomitable will. — Henrik Ibsen

But if you are to die, live first! Come forth With me into the glory of God's earth! Soon, soon the gilded cage will claim its prize. The Lady thrives there, but the Woman dies, And I love nothing but the Woman in you. — Henrik Ibsen

Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for. — Henrik Ibsen

Anyone who's sold herself for somebody else once isn't going to do it again. — Henrik Ibsen

And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56) — George Bernard Shaw

You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen: "Education is the capacity to confront the situations posed by life. — Jon Lee Anderson

Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence. — Henrik Ibsen

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

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time. — 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

Let others emulate the eagle's flight, Life in the lowly plains may be as bright. — Henrik Ibsen

(A thrill of dread runs through the whole group; ASGARDSREIEN - the ride of the fallen heroes to Valhal - hurtles through the air.) — Henrik Ibsen

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

So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this 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

A forest bird never wants a cage. — Henrik Ibsen

I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything. — Victor Garber

[From below comes the noise of a door slamming.] — Henrik Ibsen

There are people one loves and others one likes to talk to — Henrik Ibsen

KROGSTAD: The law cares nothing about motives.

NORA: Then it must be a very foolish law. — Henrik Ibsen

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. — Henrik Ibsen

Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits. — Annette Bening

Do not use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.' — Henrik Ibsen

I believe that, before all else, I'm a human being, no less than you. — Henrik Ibsen

There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man. — Henrik Ibsen

And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it! — Henrik Ibsen

This is life! It can harden and it can exalt! — Henrik Ibsen

The greatest victory is defeat. — Henrik Ibsen

She was an extraordinary person too! Would you believe it, she cut her hair short, and used to go about in men's boots in bad weather — Henrik Ibsen

STRAWMAN. Are you less Intractable than when we parted? FALK. Nay, I go my own inexorable way - STRAWMAN. Even tho' you crush another's happiness? FALK. I plant the flower of knowledge in its place. [Smiling. — Henrik Ibsen

I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future. — Henrik Ibsen

When I saw 'Legally Blonde' on Broadway, I rang my agent and said 'I want to be seen for this,' but the rest weren't big choices, really. 'Hedda Gabler' was a phone call offering it to me, and as I've said before quite embarrassingly, I didn't know the play, so I didn't sit there thinking 'I would now like to tackle Ibsen.' — Sheridan Smith

A talent for building children's souls, Hilde. So building their souls that they might grow straight and fine, nobly and beautifully formed, to their full human stature. That was where Aline's talent lay. — Henrik Ibsen