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Quotes by Irish Authors
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
"Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day."
"HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."
"Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer."
"The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is."
"Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwick's brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material."
"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."
"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"
"Few ever found enlightenment in haste, and nobody will ever discover it in gibberish."
"It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace."
"We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."
"Tell your good news as an evangelist would. Do so with a passion driven by a need to help and solve problems that some people didn't even know they had."
"Like an ant, I will find my way round any obstacle. Like a child, I will persevere with pinpoint focus."
"I can believe anything provided it is incredible."
"As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible."
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."
"The vast majority of the populace would never think of setting themselves any deadlines for the achievement of their dreams. They may have a vague notion they will get older and that one day they will probably die, but it all seems a long way away, and tomorrow will bring its own share of problems and pressing issues to fill their time."
"Speaking from the heart is simple. Listening wholeheartedly, however, is much, much more difficult and most rare."
"HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge..."
"Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air."
"For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us."
"Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque."
"If you put in the effort and focus towards a goal, you will get there quicker than most."
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
"But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."
"No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone."
"As soon as I can find the courage to put my plans to action, I will turn from being a "maybe man into someone whose future success lies completely in his own hands."
"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake."
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