I have other duties equally sacred, Duties to myself.
HENRIK IBSENHelmer: “Before all else you are a wife and a mother.” Nora: “That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being.”
More Henrik Ibsen Quotes
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A thousand words can’t make the mark a single deed will leave.
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NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I’m to get to know myself and the world outside. That’s why I can’t stay here with you any longer.
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Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing.
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I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
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The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
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Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.
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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.
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To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.
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When we dead awaken. We see that we have never lived.
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It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will.
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A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there’s no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it’s an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.
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Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less.
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A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
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Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.
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I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.
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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.
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Nobody can put a character on paper without – at any rate in part and at times – sitting as a model for it himself.
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Every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.
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It’s a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act that has something of unconditional beauty.
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The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.
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The strong must learn to be lonely.
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But a scientific man must live in a little bit of style.
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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.
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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.
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That is the accursed thing about small surroundings — they make the soul small.
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Oh courage, oh yes! If only one had that. Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.
HENRIK IBSEN