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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Most people are boring and stupid."
"It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg."
"Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us."
"A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon."
"We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon."
"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
"There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives."
"Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself."
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
"The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people."
"The craft's occupants clutched their armrests, and more than one of them closed their eyes. But not Artemis. He couldn't. There was something morbidly fascinating about flying into an uncharted tunnel at a reckless speed with only a kleptomaniac dwarf's word for what lay at the other end."
"Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying."
"The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study."
"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."
"Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art."
"If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all."
"This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right 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."
"The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it."
"The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life."
"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."
"The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life."
"My only policy is to profess evil and do good."
"She had lost the art of conversation but not unfortunately the power of speech."
"The fact that you wish to become extremely successful must mean that you currently do not see yourself as such. Therefore, you need to change. The question you should be asking is what do you need to become?"
"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
"Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat."
"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance."
"It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right."
"Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."
"When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy."
"If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you."
"Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist."
"The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless."
"Reputation is the panacea for those who lack confidence in their own decisions."
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