Great Throughts Treasury

"If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground."

"Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness as well."

"The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone."

"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness."

"It gives one a sense of freedom to know that anyone in this world can really do a deliberately courageous act."

"The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

"What's a man's first duty? The answer's brief: To be himself."

"Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness. "

"A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth."

"A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong. "

"A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed. "

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

"The pillars of truth and the pillars of freedom - they are the pillars of society. "

"Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt. "

"There are three Empires. First there is the Empire which was founded on the tree of knowledge. Then there is the Empire founded on the tree of the Cross. The third is still a secret Empire which will be founded on the tree of knowledge and the tree of the Cross — brought together."

"It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."

"He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. 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 still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it. Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is characteristic of the so-called State, and, as I have said, it is not a good characteristic."

"I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future."

"A thousand words can't make the mark a single deed will leave."

"Many a man can save himself if he admits he's done wrong and takes his punishment."

"When we dead awaken. ... We see that we have never lived."

"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."

"A forest bird never wants a cage."

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

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

"A talent for building children's souls, Hilde. So building their souls that they might grow straight and fine, nobly and beautifully formed, to their full human stature. That was where Aline's talent lay."

"Always do that, wild ducks do. They shoot to the bottom as deep as they can get, sir ? and bite themselves fast in the tangle and seaweed ? and all the devil's own mess that grows down there. And they never come up again."

"Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother."

"A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view."

"And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it!"

"An atmosphere of lies like that infects and poisons the whole life of a home. In a house like that, every breath that the children take is filled with the germs of evil."

"An unromantic poem I mean to make of one who only lives for duty's sake."

"At the next fancy-dress ball I shall be invisible. There is a big black hat - have you never heard of hats that make you invisible? If you put one on, no one can see you."

"Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. Undermine the whole conception of a State, declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty that is worth something."

"As long as a people considers it more important to build meeting-houses than theatres, as long as it is readier to support the Zulu Mission than the Art Museum, art cannot really thrive, cannot even be considered as of immediate necessity. I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood. What is needed first of all with us is to fall upon and eradicate all that gloomy medieval monasticism which narrows the view and stupefies the mind. My opinion is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one's weapons for art; one must simply turn them against what is hostile to art. First clear this away, and then we can build."

"Back he'll come...With vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and confident."

"Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul."

"BRAND: Answer me, God, in the jaws of death: Is there no salvation for the Will of Man? No small measure of salvation? [The avalanche buries him. The valley is swallowed up.] A VOICE: [Calls through the crashing thunder] He is the God of Love."

"But our home's been nothing but a playpen. I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child. And in turn the children have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played with me, just as they thought it fun when I played with them. That's been our marriage, Torvald."

"But a scientific man must live in a little bit of style."

"Courage ... oh yes! If only one had that ... then life might be livable in spite of everything."

"Deprive the average human being of his life-lie, and you rob him of his happiness."

"Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too."

"Do you know, Nora, I have often wished that you might be threatened by some great danger, so that I might risk my life's blood, and everything, for your sake."

"Do not use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'"

"Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less."

"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."

"DR. STOCKMANN: Yes, I can afford it now. Katherine tells me I earn almost as much as we spend. PETER STOCKMANN: Almost?yes!"

"Don't worry, you'll survive. No one dies in the middle of Act Five."

"DR. STOCKMANN: I have already told you that what I want to speak about is the great discovery I have made lately--the discovery that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the hole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood."