Irish Author Quotes

Oscar Wilde

George Bernard Shaw

James Joyce

Samuel Beckett

William Butler Yeats

Jonathan Swift

Bram Stoker

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they were our cousins.

George Bernard Shaw

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

A man who keeps a diary pays, Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes eventfulthen, His busy hand forgets the pen. Most books, indeed, are records less Of fulness than of emptiness.

William Allingham

One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.

The wild geese—the wild geese,—'tis long since they flew,
O'er the billowy ocean's bright bosom of blue.

Michael Joseph Barry

Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

But if I'm content with a little, Enough is as good as a feast.

Isaac Bickerstaffe

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Elizabeth Bowen

Hey, look your girlfriend is saying something. Artemis had a vast mental reserve of scathing comebacks at his disposal, but none of them covered girlfriend insults. He wasn't even sure if it was an insult. And if it was, who was being insulted? Him or the girl?

Awake thee, my Lady-Love! Wake thee, and rise! The sun through the bower peeps Into thine eyes.

Whatsoever contradicts my sense,
I hate to see, and never can believe.

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?

Bartholomew Dowling

Nor elves, nor fays, nor magic charm, Have pow'r, or will, to work us harm; For those who dare the truth to tell, Fays, elves, and fairies, wish them well.

Maria Edgeworth

Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.

George Farquhar

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast.

Oliver Goldsmith

Far as distress the soul can wound
'Tis pain in each degree;
Bliss goes but to a certain bound,
Beyond is agony.

Frances Greville

A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim;
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name.

I tell you, in the first instance, that Ireland is an enslaved country. A great mistake is entertained by many persons to the effect that there cannot be slavery—that no man can be a slave unless he be in chains, or subject to the lash of the planter like the negroes; but the slavery of which I speak is the slavery of the people, which consists in this, that they do not make their own laws themselves—that they do not make the laws by which they are governed, but that those laws are made by others, and I say it boldly, that a people so circumstanced are in a state of slavery.

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers.... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

How many chapters have been written about love verses - and how many more might be written! - might, would, could, should, or ought to be written! - I will venture to say, will be written!

O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

Patrick MacDonogh