Irish Author Quotes

In this curious world there are certain beings to whom it is given to say of all things with naïve faith, not 'I shall seek,' but 'I shall find.'

Katherine Thurston

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

The ability to achieve goals is directly related to a willingness to use the wastebasket.

Barbara Hemphill

Nature-study if it is to be possible must begin, and if it is to be fruitful must end, in something which is not strictly the study of nature, but which we call Philosophy.

T. W. Rolleston

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

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

The reconciling grave swallows distinction first, that made us foes; there all lie down in peace together.

Thomas Southerne

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

No one knows what is in him till he tries, and many would never try if they were not forced to.

Basil W. Maturin

History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.

Paul Murray (author)

In the sublime imagination of the Beatific Vision, he catches a hint of a deeper reality, but why, he asks, this distinction between time and eternity? Can the apprehension of the Infinite Good be conditioned by the clock? Oh, for a knowledge undimensioned, untimed, effect of no cause, cause of no effect!

Sister Nivedita

When I had curls
I knew more girls.
I do more reading
Now my hair is receding.

James Simmons (poet)

To grow
a second tongue, as
harsh a humiliation
as twice to be born.

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

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through‚ to be two months without going into a house‚ under the snow in trenches. And no food to get‚ maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there‚ he said‚ to feed all Ireland; but bad management‚ they could not get it.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

For the future I cease, Death approaches with little delay,
Since the dragons of Laune and Lane and Lee are destroyed;
I'll follow the heroes far from the light of day,
The princes my ancestors followed before Christ died.

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day...What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know.

Joseph O'Connor

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.

a Yea might turn in to a Nae and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied. In other talk you argument out until you get the answer you want.

Leonard Wibberley

Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,
Seeing that our footing on the Earth is brief-
Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.

Ah! my heart is weary waiting,
Waiting for the May:
Waiting for the pleasant rambles
Where the fragrant hawthorn brambles,
Where the woodbine alternating,
Scent the dewy way;
Ah! my heart is weary, waiting,
Waiting for the May.

Denis Florence MacCarthy

Find earth where grows no weed, and you may find a heart wherein no error grows.

James Sheridan Knowles

Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

Not she with trait'rous kiss her Saviour stung, Not she denied him with unholy tongue; She, while apostles shrank, could danger brave, Last at his cross and earliest at his grave.

Eaton Stannard Barrett

What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings!

Patrick R. Chalmers

Your guardian angel loves you and you are precious to them - you are the most important person in the world to them and, they have to do everything they can for you.