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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction."
"Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.''You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.''Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?''Before either.''I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?''I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.''Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.''I should like that awfully.'The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly."
"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
"What's this?' he inquired, none too pleasantly. 'A circus?'No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.'I see. And these are the clowns?'Foaly's head poked through the doorway.'Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?"
"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not."
"Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lieIf this night before God's throne should stand."
"It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings."
"It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret."
"In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?"
"Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea."
"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live-undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; 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."
"I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought'."
"The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."
"Tone of colour 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."
"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."
"Ambition had a price, and that price was friendship."
"Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."
"Maybe you're not difficult to live with at all, maybe you're just a busy, successful, beautiful woman who won't settle for anything but the best."
"I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection."
"There can be no success in sales without tenacity."
"We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us."
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them that's the essence of inhumanity."
"That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste."
"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"
"Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true."
"Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful."
"What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities."
"I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy."
"Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are."
"Don't allow your imagination to colour events as lesser men would, and see movement in motionless things."
"Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom."
"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."
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