Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
Sean O'CaseyRead
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.
Interpretation
Ideas cannot be suppressed or controlled by force; they will always find a way to emerge and thrive.
Sean O'Casey's quote emphasizes the invincibility and resilience of ideas. No matter how much one attempts to confine or destroy ideas using physical force or oppression, they will persist and find new ways to be expressed and shared. This highlights the power of thought and the inevitability of its influence on society.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a seminar discussing freedom of expression.
Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.
The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.
Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.
There's nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.
The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.
A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth - beware! - is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call.
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.
I prefer to believe that people are good and honest and respect me enough to tell me the truth. It's not easy to find those people all the time, but they're out there.
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.