Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 4

I am only a beer teetotaller not a champagne teetotaller.
George Bernard Shaw
Plato claimed that we were all joined to someone else once, we were humans with four arms and four legs, and a head of two faces, but we were so powerful we threatened to topple the Gods. So they split us from our sole mates down the middle, and doomed us to live forever without our counterparts
Sarah Crossan
Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
Oscar Wilde
To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
John Connolly
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
Oscar Wilde
I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.
Tana French
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw
Estragon: And if he doesn't come?Vladimir: (after a moment of bewilderment) We'll see when the time comes.
Samuel Beckett
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Oscar Wilde
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
A child is never the author of his own history.
Sebastian Barry
The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.
Oscar Wilde
She's in the Catskill," Shopie began, but Scathach reached over and pinched her hand. "
Michael Scott
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Who ever is adequate? We all create situations which others can't live up to then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
Oscar Wilde
A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.
Eoin Colfer
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Tana French
Ignorance, as they say, is usually fatal, but sometimes it can be bliss.
Eoin Colfer
Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.
Thomas Moore
Give women the right opportunities and they are capable of everything.
Oscar Wilde
So long as one does not despair so long as one doesn't look upon life bitterly things work out fairly well in the end.
George Moore
Now or never was the time.
Laurence Sterne
Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
Iris Murdoch
A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge
The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.
Daniel O'Connell
Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.
Emma Donoghue
Stupid men, always thinking they're the ones who get to do the rescuing.
Peadar Ó Guilín
HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
George Bernard Shaw
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
After all there is but one race - humanity.
George Moore
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
I am afraid of everybody else's secrets
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.
John McGahern
Getting there, that's what's important even if you can't get back.
Thomas O'Malley
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
Oscar Wilde
I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")
Elliott O'Donnell
Or that other bullshit, 'I need more space.' People never quantify exactly how much space they need, but strangely enough it always seems to be the exact same height, depth, and breadth as you.
Dylan Moran
I'm the kind of boy that can fall in love with any girl because I love with the heart, not the eyes.
Niall Horan
I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
Laurence Sterne
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
James Joyce
She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.
Cecelia Ahern
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
Oscar Wilde
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
I try to focus, but I can't. I know why I'm here, and then I don't know why I'm here. I understand, then I don't. I think it's fair, and then I don't. I wish I'd never done what I'd done, and then I'm glad I did.
Cecelia Ahern
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.
Edmund Burke
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Morality is not respectability.
George Bernard Shaw
A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.
George Bernard Shaw
Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped."You'll what?""I'll say I love you too.
Colm Tóibín
They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true love's path didn't run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony.
Marian Keyes
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
Flann O'Brien
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.
Oscar Wilde
Somehow everything I own smells of you, and for the tiniest moment it's all not true
Snow Patrol
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Oscar Wilde