Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not...

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination...

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.”[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press:...

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper – say on a canal barge…

I know your head aches. I know you’re tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window. But think what you’re trying to accomplish – just think what you’re dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it’s the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever...

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied,...

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

Belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah; and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

COKANE [looking compassionately at him] Ah, my dear fellow, the love of money is the root of all evil. LICKCHEESE. Yes, sir; and we’d all like to have the tree growing in our garden.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.