The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.

Life is made for the strong. There is no mercy in it for the weak– none...Such is the tragedy of desire.

Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

When you have a purpose in life it becomes the light to show you the path toward your destination.

The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.

Responsibility is the thing people dread the most of all. Yet it is the one thing in the world that develops us, gives us manhood or womanhood fiber.

Dumbledore is gone, Harry. He's gone.He will only be gone from the school when none here or loyal to him, said Harry, smiling in spite of himself.

As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

When a man is right he wants to get all that is coming to him for being right.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.