Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.
Interpretation
Joy is often a shared experience that requires companionship.
This quote by Henrik Ibsen suggests that while one can endure hardships and challenges alone, true happiness and joy are typically experienced more profoundly when shared with others. It highlights the importance of companionship in the pursuit of joy, indicating that relationships enhance our positive experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of friendship during tough times.
The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.
I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.
Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your emancipation. You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields - discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West - superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood.
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
It's a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act that has something of unconditional beauty.
The only friends who are free from cares are the goblet of wine and a book. Give me wine...that I may for a time forget the cares of the world.
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.
A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who speak up against Israel’s policies – who denounce the occupation, the blockade, and the war – are the nation’s true friends.
Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.
I dedicate the merit of the occasion to all beings. This gesture of universal friendship has been likened to a drop of fresh spring water. If we put it on a rock in the sunshine, it will soon evaporate. If we put it in the ocean, however, it will never be lost. Thus the wish is made that we not keep the teachings to ourselves but to use them to benefit others.
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