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.
Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.
Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.
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.
Isn’t all religions curious? If they weren’t you wouldn’t get anyone to believe them.
A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.
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.
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.
A man should always be drunk, Minnie, when he talks politics – it’s the only way in which to make them important.
A waste land lit by holy candles.
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.
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I’ve enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
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.
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.
Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.
The hallway of every man’s life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live.
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.
It’s my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it.
We couldn’t live without comedy.