41 Ibsen Quotes

Following is our list of the most famous ibsen quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational ibsen quotes. Hopefully, these ibsen quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your ibsen knowledge!

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Famous Ibsen Quotes

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds. — Harold Hayes

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it. — Edward Albee

Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus. — Peter Ustinov

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life. — Antonin Artaud

This above all; to thine own self be true. - William Shakespeare

This above all; to thine own self be true. — William Shakespeare

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. — Oscar Wilde

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. — Peter Brook

Within the various acts of the ecodrama should be included scenes in which men's and women's roles come to center stage and scenes in which Nature 'herself' is an actress. — Carolyn Merchant

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops. — George P. Baker

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. — William Ralph Inge

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. — Edward Albee

Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play. — Uta Hagen

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops. — Charles Scott Sherrington

Hamlet: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring? Ophelia: 'Tis brief, my lord. Hamlet: As woman's love. — William Shakespeare

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players. — William Shakespeare

Short Ibsen Quotes

  • She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments. — P. G. Wodehouse
  • You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen. — Mandy Patinkin
  • I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics. — Harvey Korman
  • Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit. — Liv Ullmann
  • Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary. — John Cameron Mitchell

People Writing About Ibsen

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
quotes on success, death and love

4052 36000
Read quotes by Edward Albee

Edward Albee
quotes on education, art and love

175 494
Read quotes by Peter Ustinov

Peter Ustinov
quotes on love, education and leadership

101 1020
Read quotes by Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud
quotes on education, religion and life

93 750
Read quotes by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde
quotes on love, love and marriage and life

1908 25561
Read quotes by Peter Brook

Peter Brook
quotes on education, culture and leadership

26 1454

More Ibsen Quotes

Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life. — Eleanora Duse

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before. — Trevor Nunn

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room. — Annie Dillard

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others. — David Mamet

I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70. — Diane Ladd

The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakespeare, and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul. — Minnie Maddern Fiske

Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, something you can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places. — Minnie Maddern Fiske

I did [Henrik] Ibsen and [Anton] Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn't get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, "You ride the horse the direction it's going." — Joe Manganiello

Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future. — Jeanette Lee

I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything. — Victor Garber

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus. — Kurt Sutter

Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants. — Jamie Sives

Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence. — George Steiner

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character. — Alex Kingston

If Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' were alive today, he would recognize the ethic that has informed capitalist and communist countries alike - economic growth before public health and well-being. The true enemies of the people ar those who continue to sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term gains. But perhaps we should all look in the mirror. — Susannah York

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso. — Philip Larkin

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