我
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
I decline to accept the end of man.
The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it.