top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. 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 call 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 defence the only arms I allow myself to use- silence, exile, and cunning."
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."
"Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir."
"We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies."
"Loyalty in a critic is corruption."
"Fairy tales are such evil stories for young children. Every time I'm in a mess I expect a long-haired posh-speaking man to come trotting into my life (on a horse of course, literally trotting himself...) Then you realize you don't want a long-haired posh-speaking man trotting into your life because he's the one who put you in the bloody mess in the first place."
"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."
"Understand why you are different and how you help, recognise your target market, and give them something they might not even realise they are missing."
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
"She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork."
"I won't quarrel with my bread and butter."
"God and other artists are always a little obscure....."
"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal."
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
"Orion nodded, then asked, 'Dwarf cheese?'Cheese made by dwarfs.'Oh, said Orion, relieved. 'They make it. It's not actually . . .'No. What a horrible thought.'Exactly."
"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day-mock me horribly!"
"But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."
"What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul."
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures."
"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."
"When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong."
"They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage."
"And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be."
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self."
"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
"We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same."
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it."
"Let your customers and prospects recommend you to each other and let you competition wish they were you. That is our mission."
"So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets..."
"Englishmen never will be slaves they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."
"I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon."
"A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonflowing, his eyeballs stars."
"A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
"I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable but that I was not very lovable myself."
"I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about."
bottom of page