Sean O'Casey Quotes

The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.

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.

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.

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

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

There's nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.

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.

To me life is simply an invitation to live.

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.

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.

The whole worl's in a state o' chassis.

I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the stars, what is the stars?

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.

When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.

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.

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.

Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.

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

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.

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!

The secret to happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

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.

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.

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

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

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.

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 wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.

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.

Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.

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.

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

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.

If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.

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

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

We couldn't live without comedy.

A man should always be drunk, Minnie, when he talks politics - it's the only way in which to make them important.

When one has reached 81... one likes to sit back and let the world turn by itself, without trying to push it.

A waste land lit by holy candles.

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.

Isn't all religions curious? If they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe them.

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

Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.