Henrik Ibsen Quotes

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

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

- Henrik Ibsen

The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.

- Henrik Ibsen

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.

- Henrik Ibsen

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

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!

- Henrik Ibsen

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

- Henrik Ibsen

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.

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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!

- Henrik Ibsen

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

- Henrik Ibsen

Marriage! Nothing else demands so much of a man.

- Henrik Ibsen

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

- Henrik Ibsen

The devil is compromise.

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

A forest bird never wants a cage.

- Henrik Ibsen

Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen

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

- Henrik Ibsen