I am proud to be an emotionalist.
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
The light music of whiskey falling into a glass – an agreeable interlude.
Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.
What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.
Tenors get women by the score.
Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.
An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.
And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.
Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.
If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.
The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously.
What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and ‘re-embody’ it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.
Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.
Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.