Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 32

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
I mean, wha comfort does pretendin to be a Buddhist or wharrever give him? What's wrong with pretendin to be a Catholic like the rest of us?
Trevor Byrne
Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Every bond is a bond to sorrow.
James Joyce
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
Oscar Wilde
Now you look here. All your father ever dreamed of for you was to do something you loved in life. He didn't care about fancy qualifications or fancy clothes or cars, just that you were both happy and fulfilled. He was so excited about your dreams for a career.
Hazel Gaynor
World opinion, though sharply divided on nuclear tests and the risk of atmospheric pollution, could congratulate itself on being united in its opposition to cannibalism. No country in the world was prepared to support the custom of eating the dead, though the right of governments to kill people, individually or by hundreds of thousands, was not questioned for a moment.
Leonard Wibberley
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
John Banville
I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments.
Samuel Beckett
Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been.
Lord Dunsany
Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.
Oscar Wilde
Bread is the staff of life.
Jonathan Swift
Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.
Bono
Let time that makes you homely make you sage.
Thomas Parnell
When one has no design but to speak plain truth he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Richard Steele
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Oscar Wilde
Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team. - From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics
Edward Fahey
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch
Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination
Oscar Wilde
Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.
George Bernard Shaw
Do we fulfill our obligations by being practical all the time?
James Plunkett
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Iris Murdoch
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard Shaw
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…
Oscar Wilde
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.
Oscar Wilde
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
W.B. Yeats
Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing
Oscar Wilde
I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.
Cecelia Ahern
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
My father was my greatest inspiration. He was a lunatic.
Spike Milligan
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.
Oscar Wilde
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde
Aim for what u want and the year will all make a sense.
Cecelia Ahern
Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde
Happiness consists not in having much but in being content with little.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith
Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.
Spike Milligan
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
Oscar Wilde
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Oscar Wilde
He put this engine [a silver pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.
Jonathan Swift
If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.
George Bernard Shaw
The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
Mccann Colum
Stories are a different kind of true.
Emma Donoghue
They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.
Michael Scott
Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.
Oscar Wilde
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Joseph O'Neill
The river this November afternoonRests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroudIts passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.
Cecil Day-Lewis
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. So that I was never disappointed, so to speak, whatever I did, in this domain. And these inseparable fools I indulged turn about, that they might understand their foolishness.
Samuel Beckett
My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!You didn't know it then-you know it now.
Oscar Wilde
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
W.B. Yeats
It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
Edna O'Brien
I know what dissipate means, Arty. I'm not three, for heaven's sake.
Eoin Colfer
Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.
James Joyce
You've recognised a fundamental feature of an addict's life. Maintaining your habit is so important you've no real interest in anything else.
Marian Keyes
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
George Bernard Shaw