Playwrights From Ireland

"This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey."

"The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom——is to die."

"When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?"

"To what fortuitous occurrence do we not owe every pleasure and convenience of our lives."

"To what happy accident is it that we owe so unexpected a visit?"

"The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died."

"The dog, to gain some private ends, Went mad, and bit the man."

"And in that town a dog was found, As many dogs there be, Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, And curs of low degree."

"A kind and gentle heart he had, To comfort friends and foes; The naked every day he clad When he put on his clothes."

"It seemed to be pretty plain, that they had more of love than matrimony in them."

"Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse."

"It has been a thousand times observed, and I must observe it once more, that the hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition."

"They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses."

"By the living jingo, she was all of a muck of sweat."

"The sigh that rends thy constant heart Shall break thy Edwin's too."

"And what is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth or fame, And leaves the wretch to weep?"

"Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long."

"No flocks that range the valley free To slaughter I condemn; Taught by that Power that pities me, I learn to pity them: But from the mountain’s grassy side A guiltless feast I bring; A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied, And water from the spring."

"Turn, gentle Hermit of the Dale, And guide my lonely way To where yon taper cheers the vale With hospitable ray."

"I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too."

"The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable."

"That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel."

"Let us draw upon Content for the deficiencies of fortune."

"Handsome is that handsome does."

"We sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favors."

"I...chose a wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well."

"I was ever of the opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population."

"A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity."

"Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel."

"Vain, very vain, my weary search to find That bliss which only centers in the mind."

"Forc'd from their homes, a melancholy train, To traverse climes beyond the western main; Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, And Niagara stuns with thundering sound."

"Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law."

"For just experience tells; in every soil, That those that think must govern those that toil."

"The land of scholars and the nurse of arms."

"Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by."

"To men of other minds my fancy flies, Embosomed in the deep where Holland lies. Methinks her patient sons before me stand, Where the broad ocean leans against the land."

"They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem, Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem."

"Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Uncle Wells was as magnificent an uncle as one could hope to have. So, too, was Uncle Shaw. He brought his mind for the children to look at, his marvellous shining mind. Too thin a mind, Philistines would object; but the very finest French watches are as thin as a couple of halfcrowns and yet keep better time than the grosser article. He did for his age what Voltaire and Gibbon did for theirs: he popularized the use of the intellectual processes among the politically effective class. And he did it with such style."

"The worst element in his mental make-up is a queer readiness to succumb to the poses of excessive virility. His soul goes down before successful force. He exalted the maker of enormous guns in Man and Superman; he has rejoiced in the worst claptrap of the Napoleonic legend; now he is striking attitudes of adoration towards the poor, vain, doomed biped who is making Rome horrible and ridiculous to all the world. When it comes to the torture of intelligent men, to vile outrages on old women, to the strangulation of all sane criticism and an orgy of claptrap more dreadful than its attendant cruelties, this vituperative anti-vivisectionist becomes an applauding spectator."

"His argument seems to be that either the Haves or the Have-Nots must seize power and compel all to come under the Fascist or the Communist plough. It is a crude and flippant attempt at reconstruction, bred of conceit, impatience and ignorance. ... [I]t reinforces the Italian tyranny. It is only fair to add that this naïve faith in a Superman before whose energy and genius all must bow down is not a new feature in the Shaw mentality. What is new and deplorable is the absence of any kind of sympathetic appreciation of the agony that the best and wisest Italians are today going through; any appreciation of the mental degradation as implied in the suppression of all liberty of thought and speech."

"Shaw is a pleasant man, simple, direct, sincere, animated; but self-possessed, sane, and evenly poised, acute, engaging, companionable, and quite destitute of affectation. I liked him."

"I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned. ... I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle. ... I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw."

"[Shaw] had just learned, more less, to ride a bicycle. And I went out for a country ride with him, and at the bottom of a steep hill the road forked and I didn't know which way to go, and Shaw was behind me. And I got off my bicycle to ask which way we should go. And he wasn't able to manage his machine, and he ran slap into my bicycle. My bicycle buckled. He was precipitated 20 teet through the air and landed on his back on the hard road. He got up, his bicycle undamaged, rode home: I had to go home by train."

"One may say that he [Shaw] did much good and some harm. As an iconoclast he was admirable, but as an eikon rather less so."

"Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate,especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators."

"He understood early the weakness of democracy; he was naturally impatient with the shallow humbug of much political talk. There was so much in it to laugh at, and so much to expose, that he even allowed himself to praise Mussolini and Hitler and to excuse all the darker deeds of Stalin. In 1948 he sent me a letter describing Russia as a democracy in which Stalin would be pushed out of power in ten minutes if he offended the majority of the Communist Party."

"Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State's right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull's Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but "a chaos of clear ideas"."

"He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity."