Top 160 Henrik Ibsen Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Many a man can save himself if he admits he’s done wrong and takes his punishment.”

— Henrik Ibsen

52. “I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.”

— Henrik Ibsen

53. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

55. “It is no use lying to one’s self.”

— Henrik Ibsen

56. “Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

58. “Different people have different duties assigned them by Nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.”

— Henrik Ibsen

59. “To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?”

— Henrik Ibsen

60. “The devil is compromise.”

— Henrik Ibsen

61. “An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty’s sake.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

64. “Because there is surely nothing in the world that can compare with happiness of forgiveness and of lifting up a guilty sinner in the arms of love.”

— Henrik Ibsen

65. “The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life – he first individualizes.”

— Henrik Ibsen

66. “What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one’s self?”

— Henrik Ibsen

67. “Really to sin you have to be serious about it.”

— Henrik Ibsen

68. “Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’”

— Henrik Ibsen

69. “I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.”

— Henrik Ibsen

70. “One should never put on one’s best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.”

— Henrik Ibsen

71. “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

72. “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

73. “This is life! It can harden and it can exalt!”

— Henrik Ibsen

74. “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

75. “Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

77. “The sea possesses a power over one’s moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.”

— Henrik Ibsen

78. “You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.”

— Henrik Ibsen

79. “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.”

— Henrik Ibsen

80. “I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.”

— Henrik Ibsen

81. “The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.”

— Henrik Ibsen

82. “It’s a release to know that in spite of everything a premeditated act of courage is still possible.”

— Henrik Ibsen

83. “I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

85. “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.”

— Henrik Ibsen

86. “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

87. “A thousand words can’t make the mark a single deed will leave.”

— Henrik Ibsen

88. “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.”

— Henrik Ibsen

89. “A woman cannot be herself in modern society,” he argues, since it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.”

— Henrik Ibsen

90. “One’s life is a heavy price to pay for being born.”

— Henrik Ibsen

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

94. “Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.”

— Henrik Ibsen

95. “The man-at-arms is the only man.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

97. “To see one’s goal and to drive toward it, steeling one’s heart, is most uplifting.”

— Henrik Ibsen

98. “Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself – thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.”

— Henrik Ibsen

99. “Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.”

— Henrik Ibsen

100. “Marriage is something you have to give your whole mind to.”

— Henrik Ibsen