Oct 16, 1854 - Nov 30, 1900
was an Irish writer and poet
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Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
The basis for optimism is sheer terror.
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do!
And now, I am dying beyond my means.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man's last romance.
As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked on as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It <br />merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at <br />best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as <br />often as possible.
