My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
In love, it is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.
Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.