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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
"Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people."
"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
"The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method."
"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."
"Let my country die for me."
"I used to play the piano in the band, and so there's some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboards."
"It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work."
"It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book."
"The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier."
"I'm sure I'm very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality."
"We must see our present fight right through to the very end."
"Everything you desire is always just outside your comfort zone, dear boy. If it wasn't you would already possess it, would you not?"
"The tattoo is there not because I believe there is something wrong with me. It's there to remind me that our flaws are our strengths."
"The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this."
"The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy, and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes."
"Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in."
"Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid."
"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."
"Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall."
"In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever."
"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."
"I shall not waste any of our brief time together flattering your ego, as others have done before, with all this nonsense about skills and talents that do not help, or worse, that you do not actually possess."
"Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them."
"I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it."
"If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example."
"My great mistake the fault for which I can't forgive myself is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality."
"One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing."
"Twilight, a timid, fawn, went glimmering by, and Night, the dark-blue hunter, followed fast."
"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."
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