"Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another."

"Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist."

"It's so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio."

"It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition."

"Music can change the world because it can change people."

"My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them."

"Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss."

"The less you know, the more you believe."

"To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater."

"U2 is an original species... there are colors and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone."

"We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong."

14. Barry McGuigan (1)


"I miss the things like the camaraderie in the gym. I don't miss being smacked in the mouth every day."





15. J.M. Synge (4)


"I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen."

"In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple."

"In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest - usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation - and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside."

"Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her."

"A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love."

"A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead."

"A woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent; but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent."

"Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away."

"An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress."

"An intellectual hatred is the worst."

"And say my glory was I had such friends."

"Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly"

"Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry."

"Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill."

"Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste."

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

"Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought."

"Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before."

"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing."

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

"I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor."

"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."

"I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death."

"I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart."

"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."

"I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher."

"I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots."

"I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.' "

"I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love."

"I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right."

"I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind."

"I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera."

"In dreams begins responsibility."

"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top."

"It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."

"Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song."

"Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."

"Man can embody truth bet he cannot know it."

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.'


"My country is Kiltartan Cross; my countrymen Kiltartan's poor."

"Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all."

"Now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

"One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end."

"Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

"Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart."

"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind."

"Swift has sailed into his rest; savage indignation there cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, world-besotted traveller; he served human liberty."

"Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

"The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth."

"The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door."

"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."

"The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark."

"The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone."

"The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart."

"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.'

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

"This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air."

"Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love."

"To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful."

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?"

"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

"We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us."

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

"When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep."

"Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself."

"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses."

"You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements."

"You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends."

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine."

"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes."

"Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."

"Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

"I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."
 

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."

"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."

"I am a drinker with writing problems."


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

"New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment... a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat."

"Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it."

"Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in."

"The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted."

"The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less."

"The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you."

"There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary."

"To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory."

"What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides."

"When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Source : brainyquote.com