The National Being quotes

That necessity is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external life correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beauty will never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid of taste.

An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.

We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are a measure of their inner life.

How could people, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuine knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anything beautiful in the heavens?

What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings.

It is enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or passions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they have given utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversies provoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics.

We have to discover what is fundamental in Irish character, the affections, leanings, tendencies towards one or more of the eternal principles which have governed and inspired all great human effort, all great civilizations from the dawn of history.

A nation is but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of liberty or dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until that master idea is manifested to us there is no shining star to guide the ship of our destinies.

Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered in the national being.

We have to see our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance, and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can wisely enlarge his boundaries.

The centre of the citizen is the home. His circumference ought to be the nation.

The vast majority of Irish citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom. An emotional relationship is not enough.

The neglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a new social order must think first of the average man in field or factory, and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will be possible through their companionship.

If you will not offer people the noblest and best they will go in search of it.

Unless the countryside can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they will go to the already overcrowded towns;

and the lessening of rural production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the problem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not only an economic problem. It is a human one.

Man does not live by cash alone, but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society offers him.

The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity. Their desires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman says, where the best men and women are there the great city stands, though it is only a village.

It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream.

They have no longer the grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities?

These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them.

Quietly and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows.

Beneath their rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. It is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hope of Ireland lies.

I would make the most passionate plea for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another?

The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven.

Those who will not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling back again on all fours in their minds to the brute.

Every wild phrase uttered by an exasperated worker is quoted against the cause of labor, and its grievances are suppressed. We are told nothing about how the worker lives: what homes, what food, his wage will provide.

The journalist holds up a moral umbrella, protecting society from the fiery hail of conscience.

The baser sort of clergyman will take up the parable and begin advocating a servile peace, glibly misinterpreting the divine teaching of love to prove that the lamb should lie down inside the lion, and only so can it be saved soul and body, forgetful …

I am the friend of revolt if people cannot stand the conditions they live under, and if they can see no other way.

It is better to be men than slaves.

The French Revolution was a tragic episode in history, but when people suffer intolerably and are insulted in their despair it is inevitable blood will be shed. One can only say with Whitman:

I believe in an orderly evolution of society, at least in Ireland, and doubt whether by revolution people can be raised to an intelligence, a humanity, or a nobility of nature greater than they formerly possessed.

Nobody can remain standing on tiptoe.

After a little time disorder subsides and some strong man leads the inevitable reaction. In France people revolted against a decadent monarchy, and in a dozen years they had a new emperor.

I wish to see society organized so that it shall be malleable to the general will. But political and economic progress are obstructed because existing political and economic organizations are almost entirely unmalleable by the general will.

Public opinion does not control the press. The press, capitalistically controlled, creates public opinion.

Our legislators have grown so secure that they confess openly they have passed measures which they knew would be hateful to the majority of citizens, and which, if they had been voted on, would never have been passed.

In all things it is best for a people to obey the law of their own being.

The lion can never become the ox, and “one law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”

Now that the hammer of Thor is wrecking our civilizations, is destroying the body of European nationalities, the spirit is freer to reshape the world nearer to the heart’s desire.

… whereas if there was any really high conception of citizenship and of the functions of the State, the citizens would agree so that works of public utility, or those which conspired to add to national dignity, should be done at least cost to the community.

Where there is no national sacrifice there is no national pride.

Because there is no national pride our modern civilizations show meanly compared with the titanic architecture of the cities and majestic civilizations of the past.

I have considered this indeed, but did not wish, nor do I now wish, in anything I may write, to say one word which would add to that old hostility.

Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all national passions, and it is the nature of hatred, as it is the nature of love, to change us into the likeness of that which we contemplate.

We grow nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate; and no people in Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and even in the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most.

We may be assured that the divine law is not mocked, and it cannot be deceived. As men sow so do they reap.

The anger we create will rend us; the love we give will return to us.

Biologically, everything breeds true to its type: moods and thoughts just as much as birds and beasts and fishes.

it contains the germ or possibility of that to which the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual in service to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, and a bad State is better than no State at all.

To be without a State is to prowl backwards from the divinity before us to the beast behind us.

The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or through the will of man. The volunteer armies do not really march to die with more readiness than the conscript armies. The sacrifice is not readily explicable by material causes.

Something, a real life above the individual, acts through the national being, and would almost suggest to us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through the individual, but must utter itself through multitudes.

There must be an orchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies.

In real truth we are all seeking in the majesties we create for union with a greater Majesty.

It is older than any name we know. It is not earthborn, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin.

Every heroic deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense.

The spirit was subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere fantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demigods and heroes fading into recognizable men.

But the threads are all taken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from the voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarer and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart.

The seeds which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruits towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again with their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew their dominion over us.

They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods.

To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland, to coordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose.

The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents.

It is the multitude of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure.

It is the multitude of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure.

Without love we are nothing.

… in leadership, the vivid original personalities who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free.

A nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions.

We must find out truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the guild of life.

Therefore I beseech audience not only of the churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals which can dominate society.

It is the work of the artist to create for us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being.

I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang a solitary song;

… done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly.

All greatness is brought about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will.

Our literature certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty conductor;

There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of them we may get mastery over them.

The wild elephant of the woods, with a greater strength than man’s, has yet been trained to be his servant, and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant.

So we may hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope that man will ever be a less powerful being.

To hope that would be to wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one harmonious whole.

At present he is feeble because he is, to use the scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.

Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict with each other.

I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life.

What profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to battle with each other for the means of existence?

I know well that no political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring it under the dominion of the spirit.