Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 66

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
Faith is blind belief. Atheism is blind disbelief. No one has all the information needed to take up such fixed positions.
Stewart Stafford
There we go, that word again: faith. Pajo fuckin loves it. I fuckin hate it. I hate it cos there's no way o trickin yerself into it, no amount o thinkin about it can get yeh there - yeh have it or yeh don't. And I don't.
Trevor Byrne
Fe es aquello que nos permite creer en cosas que sabemos que no son ciertas.
Bram Stoker
A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ.
Peter Rollins
So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)
Oscar Wilde
He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.
James Joyce
You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.
James Joyce
What is it with science these days? Everyone is so quick to believe in it, in all these new scientific discoveries, new pills for this, new pills for that. Get thinner, grow hair, yada, yada, yada, but when it requires a little faith in something you all go crazy.' He shook his head, 'If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.
Cecelia Ahern
Cut off from the land that bore us,Betrayed by the land we find,Where the brightest have gone before us,And the dullest are most behind - Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!'T is all we have left to prize:One cup to the dead already - Hurrah for the next that dies!
Bartholomew Dowling
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Seamus Heaney
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
Lord Dunsany
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.
William Allingham
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
W.B. Yeats
With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.
Oscar Wilde
The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.
Oscar Wilde
Be true to your word and your work and your friend.
John Boyle O'Reilly
Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
By the craggy hill-side,Through the mosses bare,They have planted thorn-treesFor pleasure here and there.If any man so daringAs dig them up in spite,He shall find their sharpest thornsIn his bed at night.
William Allingham
A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
Cecil Day-Lewis
. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan Boland
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.
Bono
ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoesEarning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows.Lord, what would they sayShould their Catullus walk that way?
W.B. Yeats
How far away the stars seem, and how farIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!
W.B. Yeats
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.
W.B. Yeats
I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.
W.B. Yeats
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.
W.B. Yeats
Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
Joyce Cary
All I know is a door into the dark
Seamus Heaney
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.- The Two Trees
W.B. Yeats
September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.So I give her this month and the nextThough the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered alreadySo many of its days intolerable or perplexedBut so many more so happy.Who has left a scent on my life, and left my wallsDancing over and over with her shadowWhose hair is twined in all my waterfallsAnd all of London littered with remembered kisses.
Louis MacNeice
Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
Lucy Grealy
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
W.B. Yeats
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde
When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B. Yeats
I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams.
W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats
What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B. Yeats
Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B. Yeats
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.—SIMONE WEIL
Ann McElhinney
The prosecutors squarely confronted the grisly results of abortion. And they discovered that nobody really wanted to talk about it. In fact, they learned first hand how blinkered the medical profession could be when it came to abortion. Among the unpleasant surprises they encountered early on in the investigation was the nearly universal unwillingness of doctors to help them. Hardly anyone wanted to talk. A few were sympathetic but balked at testifying. Many more weren’t so kind. Medical professionals didn’t want to contribute to any official proceeding that might shine a negative light on abortion. The prosecutors were encountering the same reluctance to speak up and do the morally and ethically right thing that had allowed Gosnell to continue killing for years.
Ann McElhinney
...for Taggart, learning the reality of abortion for the first time was shocking. “Even if it’s done right, it’s barbaric,” he told us. “I’m no holy roller, but if you see the way they actually have to do it, it’s barbaric.” The learning experience was one shared by Wechsler, Pescatore, Wood, and the rest of the team.
Ann McElhinney
So the incompetents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, knew or should have known that, even by their own lax rules, Gosnell should not have been carrying out abortions—but they didn’t care.
Ann McElhinney
With a few notable exceptions, state and local government officials had completely failed to do their jobs. Official incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, neglect, and the desire to protect abortion from a harsh spotlight whatever the cost caused needless deaths and injuries. The grand jury's conclusion was damning: Kermit Gosnell murdered and maimed with impunity for thirty years because virtually no one did his job properly.
Ann McElhinney
Pennsylvania gave Gosnell carte blanche for the next seventeen years. With every license extension and slipshod inspection, state health regulators sent a message: do what you like, because no matter what you do, we won’t bother you, and we don’t care whom you kill or injure along the way.
Ann McElhinney
Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us." -- from Skippy Dies
Paul Murray
Before me floats an image, man or shade,Shade more than man, more image than a shade;For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-clothMay unwind the winding path;A mouth that has no moisture and no breathBreathless mouths may summon;("Byzantium")
W.B. Yeats
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress
W.B. Yeats
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.
Samuel Beckett