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.
I’ll take no charity! What I get I’ll earn by taking it. I would feel no pleasure it being given to me, any more than a huntsman would take pleasure being made a present of a dead fox, in place of getting a run across country after it.
It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.
Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by God.
Well, there’s no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.
Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death.
It takes madness to find out madness.
I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.
Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.
The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.
It’s best make changes little by little, the same as you’d put clothes upon a growing child.
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.
Our curses on them that boil the eggs too hard! What use is an egg that is hard to any person on earth?
There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.
There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.
What are prophecies? Don’t we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.
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.
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.
The first play I wrote was called ‘Twenty-five.’ It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
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.