Sean O'Casey
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.Collection: Hope
That's the Irish all over -- they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.Collection: Serious Things
Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.Collection: Laughter
I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the stars, what is the stars?Collection: Stars
There's nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.Collection: Intellectual
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.Collection: Wall
Politics - I don't know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.Collection: Effort
To me life is simply an invitation to live.Collection: Life Is
Oh Lord, give us a sense of humor with courage to manifest it forth, so that we may laugh to shame the pomps, the vanities, the sense of self-importance of the Big Fellows that the world sometimes sends among us, and who try to take our peace away.Collection: Humor
The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.Collection: Book
The whole worl's in a state o' chassis.Collection: Study
So let us all who pray ask for what most of them need badly, a sense of humor to lighten their way through life, making it merrier for themselves and easier for others.Collection: Prayer
Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!Collection: Stars
The secret to happiness is to find a congenial monotony.Collection: Happiness
When one has reached 81... one likes to sit back and let the world turn by itself, without trying to push it.Collection: Trying
Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.Collection: Jesus
What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.Collection: Struggle
We couldn't live without comedy.Collection: Comedy
The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.Collection: Running
Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.Collection: Christian
Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.Collection: Prayer
A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the otherCollection: Song
A laugh is the loud echo of a sigh; a sigh the faint echo of a laugh.Collection: Laughter
Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.Collection: Laughter
A man should always be drunk, Minnie, when he talks politics - it's the only way in which to make them important.Collection: Men
Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.Collection: Inspirational
Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.Collection: Work
The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.Collection: Military
When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.Collection: Hard Work
A waste land lit by holy candles.Collection: Land
If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.Collection: Eye
Isn't all religions curious? If they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe them.Collection: Believe
The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.Collection: New York
If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.Collection: Literature
Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.Collection: Humor
Politics – I don’t know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.Collection: Greed