Henrik Ibsen

Good god, people don't do such things!

To live is to war with trolls.

Det er just den rette oprørsånd at kræve lykken her i livet. Hvad ret har vi mennesker til lykken?

I'm also like a half-drowned woman on a wreck. No one to suffer with; no one to care for.

I have skulked up there and wasted eight precious years of my life! The very day I was set free, I should have gone forth into the world — out into the steel-hard, dreamless world of reality! I should have begun at the bottom and swung myself up to the heights anew — higher than ever before — in spite of all that lay between.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney ...

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority

When I lost you, it was as if all the solid ground went from under my feet. Look at me now — I am a shipwrecked man clinging to a bit of wreckage.

"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."

Vogt dig, barn, for tjernets strømme.
Farligt, farligt der at drømme!
Nøkken lader som han sover;
liljer leger ovenover.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

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.

As soon as your fear was over — and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you — when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile.

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.