The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.
She is a girl would not be afraid to walk the whole world with herself.
It’s best make changes little by little, the same as you’d put clothes upon a growing child.
There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.
Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.
It is better to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man.
We would not give up our own country – Ireland – if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.
It takes madness to find out madness.
I said, in talking, that I felt more and more the time wasted that was not spent in Ireland.
It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
There’s more learning than is taught in books.
If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?
The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.
It’s a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.
Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.
In the whole course of our work at the theatre we have been, I may say, drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the reasons why we did not succeed… All their advice, or at least some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to make a common place of amusement.
It was at Inver Slane, to the north of Leinster, the sons of Gaedhal of the Shining Armour, the Very Gentle, that were called afterwards the Sons of the Gael, made their first attempt to land in Ireland to avenge Ith, one of their race that had come there one time and had met with his death.
As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.
It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.
I don’t know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night.
In writing a little tragedy, ‘The Gaol Gate,’ I made the scenario in three lines, ‘He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.’ I wrote that play very quickly.
And my desire,’ he said, ‘is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.
Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery’s poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.
There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.
From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
