Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 17

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a matter for common sense.""But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?""No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
Oscar Wilde
For his mourners will be outcast menAnd outcasts always mourn...
Oscar Wilde
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
She lives the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
Oscar Wilde
I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.
Oscar Wilde
I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
Oscar Wilde
Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.
Oscar Wilde
Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
Oscar Wilde
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.
Oscar Wilde
I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,
Oscar Wilde
this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night
Oscar Wilde
Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.
Oscar Wilde
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.
Oscar Wilde
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
Oscar Wilde
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…
Oscar Wilde
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
Oscar Wilde
She lives in the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination
Oscar Wilde
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.
Oscar Wilde
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Oscar Wilde
Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
Oscar Wilde
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Oscar Wilde
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Oscar Wilde
A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.
Oscar Wilde
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
Oscar Wilde
You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
Oscar Wilde
because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.
Oscar Wilde
There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
Oscar Wilde
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
Oscar Wilde
He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
Oscar Wilde
How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.""Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.""I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
Oscar Wilde
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
Oscar Wilde
She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.
Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
Oscar Wilde
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
Oscar Wilde
Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make everything better, would make anything right again.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.
Dara Ó Briain
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.
Oscar Wilde
Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.
Denis Parsons Burkitt
Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!
George Bernard Shaw
All my patients are individuals with their own story to tell, their own set of problems and their own solution. Even where the symptoms of their distress are very similar, the roads that bring them to me are not. Each of them teaches me something important, just as each new patient I meet reminds me that there is always more to learn.
Suzanne O'Sullivan
Those who have nothing give everything and those who have everything give nothing.
Derek Bell
How you do money is how you do life.
Orna Ross
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Oscar Wilde
The humans were protecting their heritage, or so they thought. Strange that Mud Men seem more concerned about the past than the present.
Eoin Colfer
*to thor* Zeus had replied that he had pulled fluffballs of lint out of his bellybutton that were bigger than Asgard
Eoin Colfer
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.
John Dominic Crossan
God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Iris Murdoch
Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been.
Lord Dunsany
But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
John Connolly
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen