Quotes from James Stephens

Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.

Forgive us all our trespasses,Little creatures, everywhere!

I hear a sudden cry of pain!There is a rabbit in a snare.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

But the law of life is change; nothing continues in the same way for any length of time; happiness must become unhappiness, and will be succeeded again by the joy it had displaced. The past also must be reckoned with; it is seldom as far behind us as we could wish: it is more often in front, blocking the way, and the future trips over it just when we think that the road is clear and joy our own.

For there are two things not easily controlled, and they are hunger and jealousy.

Deeds grow old in a day and are buried in a night. New memories come crowding on old ones, and one must learn to forget as well as to remember.

There is no danger where there is light

But the term of man and woman, of king or queen, is set in the stars, and there is no escaping Doom for any one;

Under all wrong-doing lies personal vanity or the feeling that we are endowed and privileged beyond our fellows.

Be at peace all of you, for hunger has a whip, and he will drive the strange away in the night.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing. Many a person can see a thing and believe a thing and know just as little about it as the person who does neither.

We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.

Men come of age at sixty, women at fifteen.

My three-thousand mile walk through Ireland convinced me of one thing - the possibility of organising a proper movement for the independence of my native land.

A secret is a weapon and a friend.

Life runs to death as its goal, and we should go towards that next stage of experience either carelessly as to what must be, or with a good, honest curiosity as to what may be.

God did not need any assistance, but man did; bitterly he wanted it, and the giving of such assistance was the proper business of a woman.

By having much, you are fitted to have more.

The mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more congenial.

In that wide struggle which we call Progress, evil is always the aggressor and the vanquished, and it is right that this should be so, for without its onslaughts and depredations humanity might fall to a fat slumber upon its cornsacks and die snoring.

The duty of a lyrical poet is not to express or explain, it is to intensify life.

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

A Leprecaun without a pot of gold is like a rose without perfume, a bird without a wing, or an inside without an outside.