Irish Author Quotes on Life, Love, Family and Death
Life & Life-Lessons
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
—Oscar Wilde
“We learn from failure, not from success!”
Abraham (Bram) Stoker
“We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas–stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the “story” part of the word “history,” and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.”
Frank Delaney
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
George Bernard Shaw
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Sean O’Casey
“If you accept your limitations, you go beyond them.”
Brendan Behan
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
“The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.”
George Bernard Shaw
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
William Butler (WB) Yeats
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
W.B. Yeats,
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
James Joyce
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde
“When you love someone, all your saved up wishes start coming out.”
Elizabeth Bowen
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
William Butler Yeats
Love & Relationships
“If you do not love me, I shall not be loved, If I do not love you, I shall not love.”
Samuel Beckett
“I would take the world, and break it into pieces in my hands, to see you smile watching it crumble away.”
William Butler Yeats
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Behan
“The love of a married woman is a great thing. Married men have never dreamed of it.”
Oscar Wilde
“Friendship is more tragic than love — it dies much longer.”
Oscar Wilde
Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts have to be earned.
W.B. Yeats
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde
“Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”
Edna O’Brien
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
Oscar Wilde
“But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
James Joyce, “Araby”
“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women like to be a man’s last romance.”
Oscar Wilde
Family
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
George Moore
“I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad”
Anne Enright
I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you are going to be an Irish writer.
Maeve Binchy
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
George Bernard Shaw
Death
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
Oscar Wilde
“A person can live all his life alone. Well, maybe. But still, he needs someone who buries him even though he himself can dig a grave for himself.
James Joyce
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.
William Butler Yeats
“Oh my dear, if I am destined to accept death from someone else’s hand, then let it be the hand of the one who loves me the most.”
Bram Stoker
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