Top 160 Henrik Ibsen Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You don’t get nothing for nothing in this life.”

— Henrik Ibsen

102. “Good god, people don’t do such things!”

— Henrik Ibsen

103. “Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.”

— Henrik Ibsen

104. “Don’t use that exotic word “ideals”. We have a good enough native word: “lies”.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

106. “The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions to destroy.”

— Henrik Ibsen

107. “Laughter’s all the damned thing’s fit for.”

— Henrik Ibsen

108. “Everything that I have written is closely related to something that I have lived through.”

— Henrik Ibsen

109. “There are people one loves and others one likes to talk to.”

— Henrik Ibsen

110. “He is suffering from an acute attack of integrity.”

— Henrik Ibsen

111. “You possibly believe I keep the glue Of lies for Happiness’s in a broken jar?”

— Henrik Ibsen

112. “Let others emulate the eagle’s flight, Life in the lowly plains may be as bright.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

114. “People so easily forget their past selves.”

— Henrik Ibsen

115. “No, it is the small losses in life that cut one to the heart – the loss of all that other people look upon as almost nothing.”

— Henrik Ibsen

116. “I have had a delightfully lonely time of it – plenty of leisure to think and think about things.”

— Henrik Ibsen

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community – or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community’s welfare.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

127. “I’m plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.”

— Henrik Ibsen

128. “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

129. “It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will.”

— Henrik Ibsen

130. “I go to scale the Future’s possibilities! Farewell!”

— Henrik Ibsen

131. “The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don’t have any power?”

— Henrik Ibsen

132. “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.”

— Henrik Ibsen

133. “What’s to become of the morally sound? Left out in the cold, I suppose. We must heal the sick.”

— Henrik Ibsen

134. “The younger generation will come knocking at my door.”

— Henrik Ibsen

135. “Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.”

— Henrik Ibsen

136. “I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald.”

— Henrik Ibsen

137. “NORA: No; only merry. And you were always so friendly and kind to me. But our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child. And my children were, in their turn, my dolls. I was exceedingly delighted when you played with me, just as children were whenever I played with them. That has been our marriage, Torvald.”

— Henrik Ibsen

138. “But a scientific man must live in a little bit of style.”

— Henrik Ibsen

139. “To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.”

— Henrik Ibsen

140. “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

141. “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

142. “What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up. And if a truth is as old as that, it is also in a fair way to become a lie, gentlemen.”

— Henrik Ibsen

143. “Troll, be thyself – and thyself alone!”

— Henrik Ibsen

144. “Out there, where the sky shines, humans say: “To thyself be true”. In here, trolls say: “Be true to yourself – ish.” – Peer Gynt.”

— Henrik Ibsen

145. “As soon as your fear was over – and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you – when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile.”

— Henrik Ibsen

146. “While I think of it, Mr. Werle, junior – don’t use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.”

— Henrik Ibsen

147. “You have made an empty place within me; and I must try to fill it up with something – with something that is a little like love.”

— Henrik Ibsen

148. “MAIA. – all the glory of the world? Yes, you did. And all that glory should be mine, you said.”

— Henrik Ibsen

149. “I have skulked up there and wasted eight precious years of my life! The very day I was set free, I should have gone forth into the world – out into the steel-hard, dreamless world of reality! I should have begun at the bottom and swung myself up to the heights anew – higher than ever before – in spite of all that lay between.”

— Henrik Ibsen

150. “FALK. I feel myself like God’s lost prodigal; I left Him for the world’s delusive charms. With mild reproof He wooed me to His arms; And when I come, He lights the vaulted hall, Prepares a banquet for the son restored, And makes His noblest creature my reward. From this time forth I’ll never leave that Light, – But stand its armed defender in the fight; Nothing shall part us, and our life shall prove A song of glory to triumphant love!”

— Henrik Ibsen