“There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.”

Women and music should not be dated.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.

He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately. I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.

The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.

As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

There’s one fool at least in every married couple.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.