Quote collection
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them."
"Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it."
"Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on."
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
"Enough to know no knowing."
"Sloth is all passions the most powerful."
"Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one."
"Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards."
"I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark."
"What was God doing with himself before the creation?"
"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living."
"What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!"
"POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future."
"An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage."
"What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?"
"Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning."
"That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly."
"I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know."
"I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road."
"When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line."