Anglo irish author Quotes

“All bad art is the result of good intentions.”

“A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.”

“"Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information." "I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand." "Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?" "I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person."”

“Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

“The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.”

“The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.”

“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”

“He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.”

“Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.”

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

“One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”

“You are Beautiful when you are happy”

“Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late'”

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”

“All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.”

“History is a lie commonly agreed upon.”

“Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.”

“Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.”

“Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.”

“A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.”

“Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things.”

“Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the 'L' section, and find the word 'life.'”

“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.”

“One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.”