Seán O'Casey (born John Casey, March 30, 1880 - September 18, 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Disease can never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's wailful screaming or faith's cymballic 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.
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant, 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.
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.
If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realise 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.
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 cliché-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.
It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it.
Jesus, Buddha, Mahommed, 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.
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.
Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year.
Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalysed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's dunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Work! Labour the aspergas me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow- security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Sean O'Casey
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