Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright. He is regarded as one of Europe’s most distinguished playwrights and is commonly referred to as the “father of modern prose drama.”
Ibsen was born to an affluent timber merchant family in Skien, Norway. His family’s finances collapsed when he was eight. After friends and relatives walked out on the family, Ibsen’s father became depressed, and his mother sought comfort in religion. Henrik had an introverted childhood and left home at age sixteen. He took to writing drama and producing and directing plays to provide for an illegitimate child he had with a young housekeeper.
Disappointed by the lack of success of many of his early plays, Ibsen left Norway at age 36. He moved to Italy and felt that he had “escaped from darkness into light.” With his newfound productive energy, he composed two well-known plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) that brought him worldwide fame. In 1868, he moved to Germany and wrote The Emperor and Galilean (1873,) which he considered his leading literary work, and Pillars of Society (1877.)
Ibsen’s most well-known work is Doll’s House (1879.) It attracted great fame and controversy because of its criticism of 19th-century marriage norms. Doll’s House features the marital life of socially-reputable, indulged wife, Nora Helmer. She eventually senses her isolation and suppression in her cage-like home. She feels entrapped in her marriage, in which her affluence has been purchased by the deprivation of her true identity. She declines to submit to her husband’s desire and walks out from a seemingly perfect marriage symbolized by a “doll’s house.” Besides, Ibsen strayed from the conventional narrative style by ending Doll’s House with a discussion and not an unraveling. Doll’s House is regarded as one of the foremost works of the Naturalism literary movement that represented middle-class life in real, everyday circumstances. Making a spectator feel “as if he were sitting, listening, and looking at events happening in real life” was a departure from the Romanticism and Surrealism literary styles that featured idealistic themes.
Ibsen attracted further controversy and infuriated Europe’s social authorities through his severe criticisms of 19th century morality and social norms in Ghosts (1881,) An Enemy of the People (1882,) and The Wild Duck (1884.) His later works, Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892,) featured the deliberations of introspective characters.
Ibsen returned to Norway after 27 years of self-imposed exile as a renowned iconoclast and a celebrated playwright. He died in Oslo at age 79.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henrik Ibsen
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Liberalism
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
Topics: Marriage, Wives
Castles in the air – -they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Dreams
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
Topics: Principles
The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Enemy
Different people have different duties assigned to them by Nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Success, Nature, Aptness, Appropriateness
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Democracy
The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitutes the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? 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
These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.
—Henrik Ibsen
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
—Henrik Ibsen
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.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
What’s a man’s first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Being Ourselves
If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Confidence
A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.
—Henrik Ibsen
The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness: this great unpardonable sin is the murder of the “love-life” in a human being.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Love
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Religion
Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Freedom
Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.
—Henrik Ibsen
A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Appreciation
To seek one’s goals and to drive toward it, stealing one’s heart, is most uplifting.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom-they are the pillars of society.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Society, Truth
People who don’t know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Health
This is life! It can harden and it can exalt.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
Marriage! Nothing else demands so much from a man!
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Marriage
Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Happiness
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
Topics: Capitalism
Don’t use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.”
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Idealism
The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Experience
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Solitude, Independence, Self-reliance, Self-Discovery
Everything which I have created as a poet has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.
—Henrik Ibsen
Topics: Writing
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