Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrafice his honor for the one he loves. Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.
