Quotes by Irish/Ireland authors (page 4)

"All great truths begin as blasphemies"

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him"

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"Its safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind"

Jonathan Swift, Writer

"One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good"

Jonathan Swift, Writer

"He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue"

Jonathan Swift, Writer

"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being"

James Joyce, Novelist

"My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions"

James Joyce, Novelist

"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction"

James Joyce, Novelist

"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination"

James Joyce, Novelist

"Nations have their ego, just like individuals"

James Joyce, Novelist

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"That's how it is on this bitch of an earth"

Samuel Beckett, Playwright

"Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it"

Samuel Beckett, Playwright

"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can"

Samuel Beckett, Playwright

"In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness"

Samuel Beckett, Playwright

"The presidency is an independent office and the Irish people whom I appreciate so much and I take with such responsibility have given a very clear mandate on a very clear set of ideas to me, as the ninth president"

Michael D. Higgins, Politician

"The mandate I have received and for which I will speak with heart and head to implement over the next seven years had its four pillars - an inclusive citizenship, equality and participation and respect in a creative society creating an excellence in everything we Irish do"

Michael D. Higgins, Politician

"Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured"

Michael D. Higgins, Politician

"Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots"

Rebecca West, Author

"Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth"

Rebecca West, Author

Page 4 of 56

Quotes by Irish authors