Quotes from Sean O'Casey

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

The secret to happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

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.

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.

To me life is simply an invitation to live.

Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other; two gay guardian angels every human ought to have.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its ten thousands.

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

There is a deeper life than the life we see and hear with the open ear and the open eye and this is the life important and the life everlasting.

the whole worl's in a state o' chassis

I don't believe he was ever dhrunk in his life - sure he's not like a Christian at all!

SEAMUS: It's the civilians that suffer, when there's an ambush they don't know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire. Shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland. I believe in the freedom of Ireland and that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowing about dying for the people when it's the people that are dying for the gunmen. With all due respect to the gunmen, I don't want them to die for me.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.