Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.

A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years—seldom longer.

You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you - or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which - I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.

People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind.

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..

Torvald: I would gladly work night and day for you, Nora--bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honour for the one he loves. Nora: But hundreds of thousands of women have done!

I thought you understood where I'd lost what you call my heart at the time.

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

Werle: "I believe there is no one in the world you detest as you do me." Gregers: "I have seen you at too close quarters.

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.

Men are funny characters, they must always have something to bemuse them.

You have made an empty place within me; and I must try to fill it up with something—with something that is a little like love.

Dr. Stockmann: Yes, I can afford it now. Katherine tells me I earn almost as much as we spend. Peter Stockmann: Almost—yes!

First condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence of marriage.

To think it, wish it, even want it — but do it! No, that I cannot understand.

What good would that ever do me if you were gone from this world, as you say? Not the slightest.

You see, the fact is that the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone.

That is the only relation in life that is not subject to the law of change.

The forests avenge themselves.

No, I don't think one ought to be at everybody's beck and call. Anyway, I'm not going to be.

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!

But he got right to the top. And I heard harps in the air. My - my master builder!

You possibly believe I keep the glue Of lies for Happiness's in a broken jar?

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.

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!

The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don't have any power?

And though I have sailed my boat hard aground, O, it was so grand to be sailing!

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.

It is the small losses in life that cut one to the heart.

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.