Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Johan Ibsenwas a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth20 March 1828
CitySkien, Norway
CountryNorway
...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.
In great memories there lies the seed of growth.
The strong must learn to be lonely.
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.
Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'
Oh, one soon makes friends with invalids; and I need so much to have someone to live for.
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!
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.
The younger generation will come knocking at my door.
Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.
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.
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.
A thousand words can't make the mark a single deed will leave.