The difficulty in life is the choice.
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.
Some men spend their lives watching bees and ants, noting down the habits of these insects; my pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally necessary, for the world would perish were it to become entirely selfish or entirely unselfish.
Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.
I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!
To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?
A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.
The right of property holds good in all society; but in the West, ethics invade the personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts and ideas into the world with him.
Men never get free from morality, only women.
The truth is that I am in love with Dublin. I think it is the most beautiful town that I have ever seen, mountains at the back and the sea in front, and long roads winding through decaying suburbs and beautiful woods.
Isn't it strange that religious prejudices - beliefs none possess, not even the saints, so they have lamented - divide brothers and sons from their fathers. You see, I except mothers and sisters; the female is not a religious animal. If she were, the world would have ceased long ago.
An idea is so impersonal; it is yours today and the whole world's tomorrow.
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.
Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.
The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.
Every race gets the religion it deserves, and only as policemen, pugilists, and priests have they succeeded, here and there a successful lawyer, but nothing more serious.
An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.
The right I claim is that of every human being to speak what he believes to be the truth to whomever he may meet on his way.
