Life & Wisdom Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s line is a scalpel disguised as a quip: it treats “ideals” not as noble aspirations but as a social technology for laundering self-interest. The joke lands because it’s a translation trick with moral teeth. “Foreign word” doesn’t just mean imported vocabulary; it suggests something ornamental, high-status, and suspiciously unaccountable. “Excellent native word” flips patriotic pride into an accusation: we already have a perfectly good term for what you’re doing, and it’s uglier than you want to admit.

The intent is to puncture the bourgeois habit of dressing up compromises as principles. “Ideals” are what people invoke when they want moral credit without moral cost, when they need a halo large enough to cover a bargain, a betrayal, or a convenient forgetting. By insisting on “lies,” Ibsen refuses the comfortable ambiguity that lets hypocrisy pass as earnestness. It’s not that ideals are always fraudulent; it’s that they’re easily weaponized as rhetoric, a kind of ethical perfume.

Context matters: Ibsen wrote in a 19th-century Scandinavia busy modernizing and congratulating itself on respectability. His drama repeatedly exposes how “good” households and “upright” institutions run on quiet coercion and reputational maintenance. This line channels that project into one cold sentence: if your ideals function primarily to protect your image, they’re not ideals at all. They’re cover stories, made to sound elevated because plain language would force accountability.