We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.
Category Archive: James Stephens
To understand the theory which underlies all things is not sufficient. Theory is but the preparation for practice.
You must be fit to give before you can be fit to receive.
Men come of age at sixty, women at fifteen.
By having much, you are fitted to have more.
Life runs to death as its goal, and we should go towards that next stage of experience either carelessly as to what must be, or with a good, honest curiosity as to what may be.
The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live.
Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
A man and a woman may become quite intimate in a quarter of an hour. Almost certainly will they endeavour to explain themselves to each other before many minutes have elapsed; but a man and a man will not do this, and even less so will a woman and a woman, for these are parallel lines which will never meet.
The mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more congenial.