Irish Quotes

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

It's not that I'm so clever, it is that others are so stupid.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Some people always know the price, but not the value

Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught.

Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.

Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Whoe'er excels in what we prize,Appears a hero in our eyes;Each girl, when pleased with what is taught,Will have the teacher in her thought.. . . .A blockhead with melodious voice,In boarding-schools may have his choice.

I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.

The Governor was strong uponThe Regulation Act:The Doctor said that Death was butA scientific fact:And twice a day the Chaplain called,And left a little tract.

A carpenter is known by his chips.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

Don't use big words. They mean so little.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

Our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?

on the instant clamorous eaves,A climbing moon upon an empty sky,And all that lamentation of the leaves,Could but compose man's image and his cry.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.

Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.

Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

Wisdom comes with winters

My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.

Yet they that know all things but knowThat all this life can give us isA child's laughter, a woman's kiss.

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.

You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

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

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.