top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"Plans are easy to make, dreams are easy to dream. But putting your back into it? A little bit of hard graft and discipline? That is just too scary and far too much effort for the masses."
"Sometime in the future, when business slumps and there appears to be no solution in sight, you will hear others moaning about and blaming the things that are completely out of their control, wasting hour after hour on elements, which cannot be changed. Meanwhile, you, my boy, you will be focusing your efforts on the only thing that matters. The response which ensures you reach your destination."
"Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination."
"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
"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."
"Experience is a question of instinct about life."
"Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves."
"The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude."
"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."
"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
"It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it."
"Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is."
"She roared with laughter. Passersby gave her strange looks, but she didn't care. If she'd been able to stretch her vision to see beyond the trees he disappeared behind, she would have stopped laughing. She would have seen the couple who'd been in the dark street near the restaurant the previous night, again breaking into laughter when he felt it was safe to abandon the Wally persona. Everywhere she saw that one man, she didn't see the woman behind him, with him, beside him, urging him on, supporting him. If she had, she might have wondered then who the display was really for."
"Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?"
"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."
"As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where there's dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning where others accept. Just a little less jaded, a little less cynical."
"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."
"Dangers by being despised grow great."
"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him."
"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb."
"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping."
"A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old."
"To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people amuse people or shock people."
"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."
"If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first."
"This is true joy of life-being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... instead of being a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."
"Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art."
"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
"You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub."
"Excuse me, Tex,' the nurse said, hands on hips. 'Would you mind reining in the voice. There are babies being born in this hospital. We wouldn't want the first sound they hear to be your painful howling. There could be lawsuits."
"Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all."
"Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits."
"We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."
bottom of page