Lady Gregory Quotes
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There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.
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What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.
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What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning, the country people will always say 'It is for Denmark they are crowing. Crowing they are to be back in Denmark.'
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I really do not see why there is not a splendid field for good work on the music hall stage, and if I did not have my own theatre taking up my time, I should rather like to go into it.
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The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.
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It was on the first day of Beltaine, that is called now May Day, the Tuatha de Danaan came, and it was to the north-west of Connacht they landed. But the Firbolgs, the Men of the Bag, that were in Ireland before them, and that had come from the South, saw nothing but a mist, and it lying on the hills.
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The Georges were fair; they left all to the Government; but Anne was very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised over the Irish. She died broken-hearted with all the bad things that were going on about her. For Queen Anne was very wicked; oh, very wicked, indeed!
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Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by God.
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When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate.
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My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it.
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There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.
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It takes madness to find out madness.
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It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child.
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I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.
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As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.
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In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance.
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Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
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We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.
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To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.
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There's too many sounds in the world! The sounds of the earth are terrible! The roots squeezing and jostling one another through the clefts, and the crashing of the acorn from the oak. The cry of the little birdeen in under the silence of the hawk!
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When death comes, it is not enough to have been charitable; and it is not right to touch the body or lay it out for a couple of hours; for the soul should be given time to fight for itself, and to go up to judgment.
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Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again.
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The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.
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It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.