Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 5

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke
To make a fine gentleman several trades are required but chiefly a barber.
Oliver Goldsmith
Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
Lucy Grealy
Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.
Darren Shan
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas—to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us
Paul Murray
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
Oscar Wilde
In the travellers’ world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unknown. Now the familiar is not left behind and the unknown has become familiar even before one leaves home. Unpredictability – to my generation the salt that gave travelling its savour – seems unnecessary if not downright irritating to many of the young. The sunset challenge – where to sleep? – has been banished by the ease of booking into a hostel or organised campsite with a street plan provided by the internet. Moreover, relatives and friends evidently expect regular reassurance about the traveller’s precise location and welfare – and vice versa, the traveller needing to know that all is well back home. Notoriously, dependence on instant communication with distant family and friends is known to stunt the development of self-reliance. Perhaps that is why, amongst younger travellers, one notices a new timidity.
Dervla Murphy
You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
Oscar Wilde
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
Oscar Wilde
I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
Iris Murdoch
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
The difficulty of life is in the choice.
George Moore
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?
Emma Donoghue
He had seen bigger men than he with mummy's handkerchief clutched in on hand and a bloody dagger in the other.
Eoin Colfer
To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.
Jack Lynch
Hope like the gleaming taper's light adorns and cheers our way And still as darker grows the night emits a lighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.
Oscar Wilde
Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.
John Connolly
Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.
Laurence Sterne
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Oscar Wilde
It's a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.
Augusta Gregory
I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.
Peter O'Toole
Lady Caroline: As far as I can make out, the young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire. Mrs. Allonby: The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.
Oscar Wilde
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
We display outrageously and obsessively that which we do not possess or have deeply at our disposal. If we are displaying sex with unseemly exaggeration and preoccupation then we have not found the heart of sex.
Thomas Moore
What If I still want to go?" "Then you'll go," he said. "But I wanted you to know the danger." "There's always danger." His green eyes met mine. I was starting to see It, how It could happen-Caleb and me.
Anna Carey
The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed. Not all who fail have therefore worked in vain. There is no failure for the good and brave.
Archbishop Trench
This is true joy of life-being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... instead of being a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
George Bernard Shaw
When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
What courage basically comes down to as human beings is to protect the lives of others, to go out of your way to save others.” “When a baby comes out of its mother and it moves and breathes and it’s alive, you have to do the courageous . . . you have to do the right thing,” Cameron said. “You have to protect it.
Ann McElhinney
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde
The only sin is the sin of being born
Samuel Beckett
You will do well to take advantage of Madame's short residence to get up your French a little... You will be glad of this, my dear, when you have reached France, where you will find they speak nothing else.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B. Yeats
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.
Oscar Wilde
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.
Frank Delaney
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
Samuel Beckett
There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.
Bono
Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.
Joyce Cary
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
Oscar Wilde
Well don't demand the spotlight if you can't handle the attention.
Melissa Hill
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Jonathan Swift
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Oscar Wilde
Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work.
Sarah Rees Brennan
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.
Samuel Beckett
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Oscar Wilde
Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.
John Boyle O'Reilly
First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.
Frank McCourt
The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.
John Tyndall
As long as I have a want I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
All vampires are brothers in the brotherhood of night!
Stewart Stafford
When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B. Yeats