When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
It’s I who know that well: when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
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!
That’s the Irish all over – they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.
The secret to happiness is to find a congenial monotony.
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.
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.
There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
To me life is simply an invitation to live.
There’s nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.
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.
A laugh is the loud echo of a sigh; a sigh the faint echo of a laugh.
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.
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.