You will find in me a middle aged man with a career behind me sufficiently brilliant to enable me to talk about many things interestingly; and I am not an unkindly soul, I believe.
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.
I do not believe in a universal religion any more than I believe in a universal language. My feeling is that people have to make their own religion as they have to make their arts and their parishes, and that they must find their own salvation; the salvation mongers are of not much avail.
Dublin dwindles so beautifully; there is no harsh separation between it and the country. It fades away, whereas London seems to devour the country; an army of buildings come and take away a beautiful park, and you never seem to get quite out of sight of a row of houses.
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.
Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.
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.
'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.
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.
An idea is so impersonal; it is yours today and the whole world's tomorrow.
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.
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
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.
Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.
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.
A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.
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!
The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.
