Life & Wisdom Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s jab lands because it performs the very unmasking his drama is famous for: it takes a noble-sounding abstraction and drags it into the light where it starts to look like a convenient con. The sneer at the "foreign word" is doing double work. On the surface, it’s a nationalist quip about borrowed language - the kind of pretension where importing a term can make a flimsy idea feel sophisticated. Underneath, it’s an accusation: "ideals" often function as a rhetorical perfume sprayed over self-interest, hypocrisy, or cowardice. Call them "lies" and you strip away the alibi.

This is classic Ibsenian pressure-testing of bourgeois morality. In plays like An Enemy of the People, Ghosts, and A Doll’s House, he repeatedly shows how respectability runs on euphemism: families and institutions survive by renaming ugliness as virtue, repression as duty, harm as propriety. "Ideals" become the tidy narrative that allows people to keep doing what they were going to do anyway, while feeling righteous about it.

The line’s bite also comes from its false simplicity. It doesn’t argue that ideals don’t exist; it argues that in public life they are routinely instrumentalized. By mocking the word itself, Ibsen suggests the rot is linguistic before it’s ethical: once a society prizes the sound of principles over their cost, it’s already halfway to corruption. The point isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a demand for honesty harsh enough to break the spell.