Henrik Ibsen - Life Quotes

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Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Henrik Ibsen
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
Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Henrik Ibsen
Oh courage... oh yes! If only one had that... Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.

Henrik Ibsen
It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.

Henrik Ibsen
Mrs. Elvsted: You have some hidden motive in this, Hedda!
Hedda: Yes, I have. I want for once in my life to have power to mold a human destiny.
Mrs. Elvsted: Have you not the power?
Hedda: I have not—and never had it.
Mrs. Elvsted: Not your husband's?
Hedda: Do you think it's worth the trouble? Oh, if only you could understand how poor I am. And fate has made you so rich!

Henrik Ibsen
I go to scale the Future's possibilities! Farewell!
God bless thee, bride of my life's dawn, Where'er I be, to nobler deed thou'lt wake me.

Henrik Ibsen
Take the life-lie away from the average man and straightaway you take away his happiness.

Henrik Ibsen
Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.

Henrik Ibsen
There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Henrik Ibsen
The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish. The great secret of action and victory is to be capable of living your life without ideals. Such is the sum of the whole world's wisdom.

Henrik Ibsen
I have already told you that what I want to speak about is the great discovery I have made lately - the discovery that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the whole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.

Henrik Ibsen
Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

Henrik Ibsen
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
There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.

Henrik Ibsen