Irish Quotes

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
― James Joyce

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I'm Irish!...When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”
― Morgan Llywelyn

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.”
― Alex Levine

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”
― James Joyce

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
― Edna O'Brien

“Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.”
― Bernie Mcgill, The Butterfly Cabinet

“That's right, there's free beer in Irish paradise. Everyone's jealous.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
― Pádraig Pearse

“[Waiting for Godot] has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.”
― Vivian Mercier

“You're not falling for me, are you, Irish?"

-Adam to Gabrielle”
― Karen Marie Moning, The Immortal Highlander

“The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.”
― William Butler Yeats

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
― Samuel Beckett

“There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.”
― Thomas Adcock

“My people - before I was changed - they exchanged this as a sign of devotion. It's a Claddagh ring. The hands represent friendship; the crown represents loyalty... and the heart... Well, you know... Wear it with the heart pointing towards you. It means you belong to somebody. Like this.”
― Joss Whedon

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.”
― Peter Hitchens

“For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.”
― Jennifer Armstrong, Becoming Mary Mehan

“Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’
‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

“If there were only three Irishmen in the world you'd find two of them in a corner talking about the other.”
― BRANDAN ARAOZ MARIA

“He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs

“[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.”
― Courtney Love

“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”
― Flann O'Brien

“If you own a bar on your own, you're a player; if you own it with your beloved twin sister, you're–"

"Irish.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl