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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Sometimes, if you get too close to a subject you can miss what's most important."
"I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die."
"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober."
"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."
"Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you."
"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life."
"Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting."
"I have discovered fallen trees across my path and have possessed neither the strength to move them nor the patience or tenacity to find an alternative way round. I have simply returned to where I came from, and told myself there had been no other choice."
"You cannot plan the future by the past."
"And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another."
"All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets."
"Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?"
"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."
"No, I'm afraid your overconfidence, as with most young men who dream of becoming successful, can quite quickly become the Achilles' heel of your continued mediocrity."
"My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers."
"Loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin."
"22% of current business-to-business salespeople will be replaced by search engines within the next five years."
"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."
"Listen to people from your heart, as if your life depended on it, and you will find that in turn people will listen to you with all of theirs."
"I should become happier at what I do and leave others happier than before they'd met me."
"I also believe that when people are going through difficult situations in life... it causes them to search a lot more. They search life and search their soul. When you're searching, you're suddenly a lot more open to the world around you, to the possibilities, to things you never thought about before. - When you're happy, you don't question the world so much. When you're lost, you question everything. The very reason why it is so essential to human self-discovery."
"My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice."
"But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?"
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."
"All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to."
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants."
"To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
"But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep on adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or egg collection."
"You can lose a man like that by your own death but not by his."
"Sometimes it's best not to know, because even when you know, it doesn't matter anyway. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is often a responsibility nobody wants."
"Could trying your hardest, but never being quite good enough ever be acceptable to anyone? Is that what your dreams are made of?"
"I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh."
"Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.-I will take the risk, said Stephen.-And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had."
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