It is better to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man.
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.
There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.
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.
Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.
She is a girl and would not be afraid to walk the whole world with herself.
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.
It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.
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.
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.
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.
Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body.
What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning, the country people will always say ‘It is for Denmark they are crowing. Crowing they are to be back in Denmark.’
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?
Everything that is bad, the falling sickness – God save the mark – or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.
There’s more learning than is taught in books.