Top 100 Quotes About Ibsen
#1. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Trevor Nunn
#2. Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.
Liv Ullmann
#3. You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.
Philip Larkin
#5. Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
Terry Teachout
#6. I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing.
Zeljko Ivanek
#7. I relate to Nora's transformation in Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House,' and I also relate to both sisters' journeys in John Madden's film 'Proof.'
Autumn Reeser
#8. You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
Mandy Patinkin
#9. And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)
George Bernard Shaw
#10. Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.
Jeanette Lee
#11. I studied acting in NYU's graduate program, in which we covered everything from Ibsen and Chekov to August Wilson and David Mamet.
Andre Holland
#12. When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
Annette Bening
#13. Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.
Eleanora Duse
#14. Gemma Arterton in 'The Master Builder' at the Almeida - she was absolutely brilliant. Ibsen is difficult and quite hard to follow, but she just brings the stage to life.
Luke Evans
#15. I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.
Harvey Korman
#16. I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.
Ving Rhames
#17. 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
#18. I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.
Alex Kingston
#19. The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#20. Ibsen: "Education is the capacity to confront the situations posed by life.
Jon Lee Anderson
#21. I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.
Diane Ladd
#22. Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.
Annette Bening
#23. She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.
P.G. Wodehouse
#24. A lot of young girls who came to see me in 'Legally Blonde' have come to see 'Hedda,' and they hadn't heard of the play either, just like I was before I did it! If I can bring a younger generation to see an Ibsen play; that's just brilliant.
Sheridan Smith
#25. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
John Logan
#26. For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.
Harold Bloom
#27. I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.
Kurt Sutter
#28. I did [Henrik] Ibsen and [Anton] Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn't get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, "You ride the horse the direction it's going."
Joe Manganiello
#29. To "those about to marry," Ibsen therefore says in effect, "Be sure you are not in love!" And to those who are in love he says, "Part!
Henrik Ibsen
#30. You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen's poem
To live it to do battle with trolls
in the vaults of the heart and brain.
To write: that is to sit
in judgement over one's self.
Robertson Davies
#31. A man's moral character may be completely sapped; that is the dreadful part of it.
Henrik Ibsen
#32. I have other duties equally sacred ... Duties to myself.
Henrik Ibsen
#33. 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
#34. Anyone who's sold herself for somebody else once isn't going to do it again.
Henrik Ibsen
#35. 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
#36. Because there is surely nothing in the world that can compare with happiness of forgiveness and of lifting up a guilty sinner in the arms of love.
Henrik Ibsen
#37. Oh yes, right - right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?
Henrik Ibsen
#38. 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
#39. [Suddenly letting slip the train of thought.] Do you know, the people down at the hotel think she's mad. PROFESSOR RUBEK. Indeed? And pray what do the people down at the hotel think of you and the bear-killer?
Henrik Ibsen
#40. You possibly believe I keep the glue Of lies for Happiness's in a broken jar?
Henrik Ibsen
#41. 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
#42. Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves.
Henrik Ibsen
#43. There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart.
Henrik Ibsen
#44. In great memories there lies the seed of growth.
Henrik Ibsen
#45. The younger generation will come knocking at my door.
Henrik Ibsen
#46. To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.
Henrik Ibsen
#47. It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life
Henrik Ibsen
#48. What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?
Henrik Ibsen
#49. OSWALD: [Repeats, in a dull, toneless voice.] The sun. The sun.
Henrik Ibsen
#50. STRAWMAN. Are you less Intractable than when we parted? FALK. Nay, I go my own inexorable way - STRAWMAN. Even tho' you crush another's happiness? FALK. I plant the flower of knowledge in its place. [Smiling.
Henrik Ibsen
#51. 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
#52. When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.
Henrik Ibsen
#53. The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.
Henrik Ibsen
#54. Let others emulate the eagle's flight, Life in the lowly plains may be as bright.
Henrik Ibsen
#55. There is nothing so enervating and exhausting as this hopeless waiting. I dare say this is only a transition period. I will and shall have a victory some day. If the powers that be have shown me so little favor as to place me in this world and make me what I am, the result must be accordingly.
Henrik Ibsen
#56. That is the accursed thing about small surroundings
they make the soul small.
Henrik Ibsen
#57. She was an extraordinary person too! Would you believe it, she cut her hair short, and used to go about in men's boots in bad weather
Henrik Ibsen
#59. Dr. Stockmann. 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 hole fabric of our
civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.
Henrik Ibsen
#60. Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.
Henrik Ibsen
#61. I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.
Henrik Ibsen
#62. People so easily forget their past selves.
Henrik Ibsen
#63. I'm inclined to think we are all ghosts-every one of us. It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. Its all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that.
Henrik Ibsen
#64. The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom - these are the pillars of society.
Henrik Ibsen
#65. 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
#66. The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions to destroy.
Henrik Ibsen
#67. These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.
Henrik Ibsen
#68. The sea possesses a power over one's moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.
Henrik Ibsen
#69. A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.
Henrik Ibsen
#70. Whether I pound or am being pounded, all the same there will be moaning!
Henrik Ibsen
#71. World-comedy of Love's contriving - naive fools of fancy, passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle passion.
Henrik Ibsen
#72. Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing
Henrik Ibsen
#75. SIGURD. Man's will can do this and that; but fate rules in the deeds that shape our lives - so has it gone with us twain.
Henrik Ibsen
#77. Marriage is something you have to give your whole mind to.
Henrik Ibsen
#78. Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.
Henrik Ibsen
#79. Not in that sense. What I need is the companionship of another person who can, as it were, complete me - supply what is wanting in me - be one with me in all my striving. MAIA.
Henrik Ibsen
#80. There is always a risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there is more risk.
Henrik Ibsen
#81. However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased..
Henrik Ibsen
#82. 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
#83. If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
Henrik Ibsen
#84. The White God is coming northward; him will I not meet; the old gods are strong no longer; - they sleep, they sit half shadow- high; - with them will we strive!
Henrik Ibsen
#85. It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Henrik Ibsen
#86. Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
Henrik Ibsen
#87. first condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence of marriage.
Henrik Ibsen
#88. KROGSTAD: The law cares nothing about motives.
NORA: Then it must be a very foolish law.
Henrik Ibsen
#89. A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.
Henrik Ibsen
#90. I'm completely alone in the world; it frightens me to be so empty and lost.
Henrik Ibsen
#91. 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
#92. (A thrill of dread runs through the whole group; ASGARDSREIEN - the ride of the fallen heroes to Valhal - hurtles through the air.)
Henrik Ibsen
#93. Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.
Henrik Ibsen
#94. OSWALD: For I'm not so afraid of death--though I should like to live as long as I can.
MRS. ALVING: Yes, yes, Oswald, you must!
OSWALD: But this is so unutterably loathsome.
Henrik Ibsen
#95. You see, the fact is that the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone.
Henrik Ibsen
#96. It's a release to know that in spite of everything a premeditated act of courage is still possible.
Henrik Ibsen
#97. And though I have sailed my boat hard aground,
O, it was so grand to be sailing!
Henrik Ibsen
#98. So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.
Henrik Ibsen
#99. If only I could master that demon of procrastination that goes about like a roaring lion and devours all my good intentions, I should become the most punctual man in the world.
Henrik Ibsen
#100. 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.
Henrik Ibsen
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