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Quotes by Irish Authors
"The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."
"To be on the alert is to live to be lulled into security is to die."
"If customers don't trust you to help them at the beginning of the sales process, they certainly won't trust you with their money at the end of it."
"You can only see your current horizon. Every time you move nearer to your desired destination, new horizons will become clear. New, previously hidden, opportunities will come into view."
"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic."
"Fairy tales, just a fancy word for lies."
"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of."
"Every life is many days day after day. We walk through ourselves meeting robbers ghosts giants old men young men wives widows brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
"How we feel about those we give our business to is of vital importance."
"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."
"It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs."
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
"That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You're both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds."
"Sometomes that's all people ever really need. Just to know."
"There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket."
"And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades."
"It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too."
"If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there."
"The most painful moment in my life also became the moment I showed the most strength and courage."
"In this world there are those who enjoy giving people balloons and there are those who take great pleasure in popping them. And I wish to be remembered as being firmly in the first party."
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
"Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams."
"We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists."
"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired."
"History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles."
"There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?"
"Like the evangelist, I will shine with the light I have been shown, recognise that I have the ultimate solution for all my prospects, nurture that feeling deep within, and repeat the words to myself every day, until there is no doubt in my mind that keeping such good news hidden would be the very worst type of sin."
"A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."
"Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude."
"While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."
"Young man, your problem and the reason so many like you fail, is simply because you allow yourself to give up far too early."
"Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional."
"There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."
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