Quotes from 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.

You don't get nothing for nothing in this life.

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.

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.

People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.

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.

Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'

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.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

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

Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

Mrs LINDE: When you've sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don't do it second time.

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

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

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom-they are the pillars of society.

The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.

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

To seek one's goals and to drive toward it, steeling one's heart, is most uplifting!

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