Irish quotes

Happy St Patrick's Day from Irish I's!
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St. Patrick's Day is an enchanted time -- a day to begin transforming winter's dreams into summer's magic!
Adrienne Cook

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.
Maria Edgeworth

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
Oscar Wilde

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
Samuel Beckett

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C.S. Lewis

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Jonathan Swift

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.
Bram Stoker

We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1955)

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.
Samuel Lover

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
Oliver Goldsmith

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch
which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan

When all the fuss has died down and the lads get back to I'm sure what will be a heroes' welcome, the wounds will heel and the wise man in the pub will say "Sure, 'twas only an oul match anyway!"
Contributed by an Irish reader after Spain defeated Ireland in the 2002 World Cup.

Hills as green as emeralds, cover the countryside,
Lakes as blue as sapphires are Ireland's special pride,
And rivers that shine like silver make Ireland look so fair,
But the friendliness of her people is the richest treasure there.
Contributed by Bea Sager

Ireland is a fruitful mother of genius, but a barren nurse.
John Boyle O'Reilly

A life making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing at all.
G.B. Shaw

The intellect is forced to choose: Perfection of the life, or of the work.
W. B. Yeats

"A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers."
John F. Kennedy

I pedalled on towards Athlone through slashing rain across brown miles of harvested bog - looking like a child's dream of a world made of chocolate.
Dervla Murphy, A Place Apart, 1978

In doggerel and stout let me honour this country
though the air is so soft that it smudges the words.
Louis MacNeice

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
Samuel Butler

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

There is an Irish way of paying compliments as though they were irresistible truths which makes what would otherwise be an impertinence delightful.
Katherine Tynan Hinkson

A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
Sean O'Casey

One wonders in this place, why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris where it would be better, one would think to live in a tent or hut, with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air which is like wine in one's teeth.
J. M. Synge

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
W. B. Yeats

A man who loses his money gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.
George Bernard Shaw

In Ireland, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs.
Sir John Pentland Mahaffy

A man without a blackthorn stick is a man without an expedient.
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Oscar Wilde

"He was a bold man that first ate an oyster"
Jonathan Swift

New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.
Anonymous

No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year.
Sean O’Casey

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
GBS