Seán O'Casey Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm, all along, out along, down along lea. A laugh is a great natural stimulator, a pushful entry into life; and once we can laugh, we can live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
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!

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
One minute with him is all I ask; one minute alone with him, while you're runnin' for th' priest an' th' doctor.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
That's the Irish people all over—they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

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

Seán O'Casey
The Drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candlesticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense nor 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 its roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
Disease can never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's wailful screaming or faith's cymballic prayer.

Seán O'Casey
It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be dethrimental to keep it.

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

Seán O'Casey
Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
A few hundhred scrawls o' chaps with a couple o' guns and Rosary beads, again' a hundhred thousand thrained men with horse, fut an' artillery... an' he wants us to fight fair!

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

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

Seán O'Casey
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.

Seán O'Casey
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.

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

Seán O'Casey
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

Seán O'Casey