Top 160 Henrik Ibsen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it!”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

53. “Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.”

— Henrik Ibsen

54. “Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

60. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

63. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

66. “Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.”

— Henrik Ibsen

67. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

74. “The devil is compromise.”

— Henrik Ibsen

75. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

86. “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

87. “The majority never has right on its side.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

92. “I must stand quite alone, if I am to understand myself and everything about me.”

— Henrik Ibsen

93. “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are – or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.”

— Henrik Ibsen

94. “Do think it quite incomprehensible that a young girl – when it can be done – without any one knowing – should be glad to have a peep, now and then, into a world which – which she is forbidden to know anything about?”

— Henrik Ibsen

95. “Oh yes, right – right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?”

— Henrik Ibsen

96. “The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.”

— Henrik Ibsen

97. “Oh, yes – you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side – unfortunately; but right it has not.”

— Henrik Ibsen

98. “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

99. “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

100. “You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you – or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which – I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.”

— Henrik Ibsen