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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself."
"They say fingers were made before forks and hands before knives."
"If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame."
"I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other."
"In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it."
"All my day is spent dealing with other people. When I come home I like it to be empty. The presence of others in my house kind of annoys me. I love coming home and shutting the doors. I feel brain dead. I'm relatively available, but not to live with."
"What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides."
"Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed."
"The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it."
"The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better."
"Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive."
"Some have said it is the easiest group at the World Cup, but we realize it won't be like that. Germany are a tremendous side, but to be honest I don't know much about Cameroon and Saudi Arabia."
"But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it."
"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while."
"New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment... a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat."
"Right, well, we've got to work out what we need. We've got to work out what we need, how we get it, and what we need to get to get what we need."
"I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer."
"People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us."
"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."
"The country is in an extraordinary ferment."
"Alas! if the principles of contentment are not within us, the height of station and worldly grandeur will as soon add a cubit to a man's stature as to his happiness."
"I believe that God made this wonderful universe and all that exists."
"How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.""Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.""I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances."
"Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse."
"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."
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