Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Boston, n.: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fatade of his appearance.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

An Englishmen thinks seated; a Frenchmen standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.

I'm a paradox! I'm Irish and allergic to alcohol.

Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.

I will try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a prospective commencement speaker. 'Think of yourself as the body at an Irish wake,' he said. 'They need you in order to have the party, but no one expects you to say very much.'

I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more?

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.