Top 160 Henrik Ibsen Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

104. “The worst that a man can do to himself is to do injustice to others.”

— Henrik Ibsen

105. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

108. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

114. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

119. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

124. “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

125. “You don’t get nothing for nothing in this life.”

— Henrik Ibsen

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

131. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

136. “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

137. “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

138. “Oh, one soon makes friends with invalids; and I need so much to have someone to live for.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

140. “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

141. “It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.”

— Henrik Ibsen

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Henrik Ibsen

146. “Time was when I was young, like you, and played Like you, the unconquerable Titan’s part; Year after year I toiled and moiled for bread, Which hardens a man’s hand, but not his heart. For northern fells my lonely home surrounded, And by my parish bounds my world was bounded.”

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Henrik Ibsen

149. “I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority.”

— Henrik Ibsen

150. “The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen – an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his “social philosophy” is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating “marriage for love”;.”

— Henrik Ibsen