top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech."
"The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post."
"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations."
"He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him."
"You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
"Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also."
"It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind."
"No one can mock your meagre achievements or inability to accomplish the simplest of tasks, if they remain figments of your imagination. You can revel, again and again, in the glory of a fairy tale doomed never to appear in reality."
"Quite so. Quite right. And yet human beings, who dream ofbecoming more successful often fool themselves into believing thatit can happen without changing a single thing about themselves.They believe that success is some mysterious external factor thatwill just sort itself out while they sleep."
"Currently, you are approaching each opportunity with a single possible outcome and when that doesn't happen you fool yourself that there was nothing more that you could have done."
"Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better."
"To be popular one must be a mediocrity.""Not with Women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.""It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmered Dorian."
"An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends."
"Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben."
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more."
"And how delightful other people's emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends-those were the fascinating things in life."
"Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?-I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"
"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"I now know that success can not choose me. It is waiting on a path that I must walk. In truth, it waits there for everyone. Many do not know where the path begins. Some search for a shortcut to the end. But the majority of the world does not even realise there is a path there at all."
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
"My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about."
"People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it."
"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."
"That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get at a man through his own religion not through yours."
"Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you'll land among the stars."
"I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness."
bottom of page