Henrik Ibsen Quotes (1828-1906)

“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.”

“Only the spirit of rebellion craves for happiness in this life. What right have we human beings to happiness?”

“How much are we really in duty bound to pin our faith to ? Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five?”

“A political party—it’s like a sausage grinder; it grinds all the heads up together into one mash, and then it turns them out, link by link, into fatheads and meatheads!”

“I've 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, Doctor—to develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.”

“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 still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it.”

“What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that 'walks in us.' There are all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no tangibility, but they haunt us all the same and we can not get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea.”

“Erring soul of man — if thou wast indeed forced to err, it shall surely be accounted to thee for good on that great day when the Mighty One shall descend in the clouds to judge the living dead and the dead who are yet alive!”

“The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was due to their extraordinary genius and even more so to the awakening and seeking of a small minority for new truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual support. Yet even to this day Ibsen is unpopular, while Poe, Whitman and Strindberg have never "arrived."”