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.

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.

Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.

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.

That's the Irish all over -- they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.