To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?
Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.
There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.
It is no use lying to one’s self.
Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less.
Marriage! Nothing else demands so much of a man.
The man-at-arms is the only man.
A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney...
One should never put on one’s best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.
Nobody can put a character on paper without – at any rate in part and at times – sitting as a model for it himself.
Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
Helmer: “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.”
Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.
If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart.
I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority.
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.
To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.