A laugh is the loud echo of a sigh; a sigh the faint echo of a laugh.

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.

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.

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.

A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other

It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it.