1. Oscar Wilde (37)
"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
"The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything."
"Those whom the gods love grow young."
"In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."
"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."
"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
"There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."
"Children have a natural antipathy to books--handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous."
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
"The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are."
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company."
"What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying."
"Men marry because they are tired;
Women because they are curious. Both are disappointed."
"When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs."
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
"Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What (women) like is to be a man's last romance."
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
| Lord Illingworth: | "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy." | | Mrs. Allonby: | "No man does. That is his." |
"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
"One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."
"When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers."
"He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about."
"How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"Moderation is a fatal thing... Nothing succeeds like excess."
"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
"To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
"It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection."
"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
"He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time."
2. George Bernard Shaw (14)
"I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead--ahead of myself as well as you."
"Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple...Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond."
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
"You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
"Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run."
"The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."
"The seven deadly sins...Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted."
"Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air...It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability."
"Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?"
"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience."
"The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor."
"A man of great common sense and good taste--meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."
"Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt."
3. Samuel Beckett (30)
"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."
"Birth was the death of him."
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
"Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better."
"Habit is a great deadener."
"How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones."
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
"I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo."
"I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning."
"It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter."
"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
"Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it."
"Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss."
"Make sense who may. I switch off."
"My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art."
"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile...a stain upon the silence."
"Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must."
"The bastard! He doesn't exist!"
"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet."
"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
"We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?"
"We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals."
"What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes."
"Words are all we have."
4. Sean O'Casey (13)
"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
"Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity."
"Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle."
"Laughter is wine for the soul-laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living."
"No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year."
"The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction."
"The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live."
"The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood."
"The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!"
"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."
"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."
"You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build."
5. Gerry Adams (2)
"Hugging trees has a calming effect on me. I'm talking about enormous trees that will be there when we are all dead and gone. I've hugged trees in every part of this little island."
"Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war."
6. Daniel O'Connell (2)
"Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."
"There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong."
7. Michael Flately (5)
"I would rather be having a burger and beers with my mates but I can't do that when I know I've got to dance."
"I'm not obsessed with how I look I just need to be really fit in order to dance."
"I'm proud of my Irish heritage and culture and this show will feature a lot of Irish dancing."
"My heart is saddened with the news of the Pope's passing. He was truly the greatest man on the planet, the nearest to a saint."
"Whenever I hear, 'It can't be done,' I know I'm close to success"
8. Mary McAleese (6)
"It is important that we do not complacently assume that economic success and social disparity inevitably go hand-in-hand."
"That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency."
"The extent to which all people in our society are made to count, and believe that they count, is not just a measure of decency; it makes sound economic sense."
"To all of our friends in Irish-America and beyond, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude. Whenever we needed your friendship and encouragement, you were there for us."
"We are a vibrant first-world country, but we have a humbling third-world memory."
"Whatever changes the new era brings, whatever new pathways we take, I am sure that our special relationship with America - forged in adversity, will not change."
9. Pierce Brosnan (8)
"Acting allows me to explore new worlds, to discover characters by delving into their lives, and ultimately to become someone else entirely."
"For me, acting is doing."
"I don't see myself as the Hunk of the Month."
"I had to have some balls to be Irish Catholic in South London. Most of that time I spent fighting."
"My mother was the prettiest woman in the town. He was a bit older than her. They made me. And he split."
"Some people have a tendency to get knocked down in this business and sulk and whine, and they just create a rod for their back, really. You have to have broad shoulders and get through it."
"There's too many people in seats of power who just haven't got a clue what they're doing. They're bean counters, and it just pisses me off because consequently our kids go to see crap movies."
"When people don't believe in you, you have to believe in yourself."
10. Gabriel Byrne (1)
"It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'
11. Bob Geldof (2)
"It went beyond idealism and that ridiculous term activism, which basically means talking about something but doing nothing. We made giving exciting."
"It's really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you're going to get it to these people."
12. Liam Neeson (3)
"Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyse it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning."
"In Los Angeles, it's like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they're morally right. That's when you want to choke people, you know?"
"Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift."
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