We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.