Flann O'Brien Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads.

Flann O'Brien
A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.

Flann O'Brien
The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even.
Sometimes misquoted as firewood instead of firwood

Flann O'Brien
The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.

Flann O'Brien
Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.

Flann O'Brien
Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.

Flann O'Brien
I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.

Flann O'Brien
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.

Flann O'Brien
If the spoken word is repeated often enough, it is eventually written and thus made permanent…Many a decent man who has written a bad cheque knows the truth of that.

Flann O'Brien
He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Flann O'Brien
I opened it at page 96—the secret page on which I write my name to catch out borrowers and book-sharks.

Flann O'Brien
The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.

Flann O'Brien
When money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

Flann O'Brien
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.

Flann O'Brien
I suppose that so long as there are people in the world, they will publish dictionaries defining what is unknown in terms of something equally unknown.

Flann O'Brien
A bad business, opening dictionaries; a thing I very rarely do. I try to make it a rule never to open my mouth, dictionaries, or hucksters' shops.

Flann O'Brien
Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Flann O'Brien
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based upon licensed premises.

Flann O'Brien
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.

Flann O'Brien
I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.

Flann O'Brien
Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.

Flann O'Brien
When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

Flann O'Brien
I fear that being a patient in any hospital in Ireland calls for two things—holy resignation and an iron constitution.

Flann O'Brien