Irish Quotes: 50 Famous Lines And Who Really Said Them

The best-known Irish quotes come from Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift and James Joyce. Below are over 50 real lines, grouped by life, love, friendship, drink, home, writing and humour, each with the speaker and source. Some famous ones are fakes. Yeats never wrote “There are no strangers here”, and Wilde never said “Be yourself”.

Search for Irish quotes and you’ll find hundreds. Most come with no source at all.

A good few aren’t Irish. Some were never said by anyone famous. One of the most popular was spread by Irish tourism adverts in the 1960s.

So every quote here has a named speaker and, wherever possible, the play, poem or book it came from. At the end, there’s a section on the famous fakes.

Jump to:

Irish quotes about life
Irish quotes about love
Irish quotes about friendship
Irish quotes about drink
Irish quotes about home and leaving
Irish quotes about writing
Oscar Wilde quotes and other funny Irish quotes
Famous Irish quotes that are fake
Irish quotes FAQ

Irish quotes about life

The Irish are good at the big questions, and better at answering them with a joke.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892).
“May you live all the days of your life.” Jonathan Swift, a toast in Polite Conversation (1738).
“No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.” J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea (1904).
“I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?'” George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921).
“Longest way round is the shortest way home.” James Joyce, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922).
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796).
“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” W.B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben” (1939).
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983).

The Yeats lines are carved on his gravestone at Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo.

Irish quotes about love

Yeats owns this section. Wilde and Shaw stop it getting soppy.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” W.B. Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (1899).
“Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye”. W.B. Yeats, “A Drinking Song” (1910).
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895).
“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity”. George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904).
“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903).

Irish quotes about friendship

For a card, a speech or a best friend’s birthday, start here.

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
“Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.” Oscar Wilde, “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated” (1894).
“I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine”. Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.” W.B. Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” (1937).
“What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast, The Four Loves (1960).

Irish quotes about drink

Yes, there’s a drink section. We’d never hear the end of it otherwise.

“Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.” James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).
“He was a bold man, that first eat an oyster.” Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (1738). “Eat” is Swift’s spelling, not mine.
“A pint of plain is your only man.” Flann O’Brien, from the comic verse in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).
“To get drunk was a victory.” Brendan Behan, quoted in A Contemporary Reader (1961).
“I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.” George Bernard Shaw, Candida (1898).

To be fair to Behan, he meant Dublin during the Depression, when he was growing up. Getting enough to eat was an achievement then.

Shaw himself didn’t drink at all. Make of that what you will.

Captain Boyle in Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) gets the last word. Drunk on the final page, he decides the whole world is in a “state o’ chassis”. For lines to raise a glass with, see my Irish toasts.

Irish quotes about home and leaving

Millions left Ireland. The writers never stopped writing about it.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree”. W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890).
“I always write about Dublin”. James Joyce, to Arthur Power. He said that if he could get to the heart of Dublin, he could reach the heart of every city in the world. Quoted in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959, revised 1982).
“…an Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.” George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904).
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay”. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770).
“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood”. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (1996).
“No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation”. Charles Stewart Parnell, speech in Cork (1885).
“…let my epitaph be written.” Robert Emmet, the end of his speech from the dock (1803), in its best-known version.

Yeats wrote Innisfree in London, homesick for Sligo. Joyce wrote Ulysses about Dublin while living in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Goldsmith’s poem is about a village cleared by a rich landowner, its people forced to emigrate.

In the best-known version, Emmet asked that his epitaph wait until Ireland took her place among the nations of the earth. Parnell’s words are carved on his monument on O’Connell Street in Dublin.

Wolfe Tone wrote of his aim to put “the common name of Irishman” in place of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.

In her acceptance speech on 9 November 1990, Mary Robinson thanked the women of Ireland. Instead of rocking the cradle, she said, they had “rocked the system”.

Irish quotes about writing

A small island with four Nobel prizes for literature was always going to have opinions on writing.

“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists” (1903).
“Words alone are certain good.” W.B. Yeats, “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” (1889).
“Gods make their own importance.” Patrick Kavanagh, the last line of his sonnet “Epic”.
“I write exactly as I speak”. Maeve Binchy, asked about her influences by the Guardian (2008).

The four Irish Nobel winners are Yeats (1923), Shaw (1925), Beckett (1969) and Heaney (1995). More in my guide to the best Irish poets.

Oscar Wilde quotes and other funny Irish quotes

Wilde gets his own section, or he’d take over the rest. He was born in Dublin in 1854 and went to Trinity before Oxford.

“I can resist everything except temptation.” Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892).
A cynic is “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde, the same play.
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” Oscar Wilde, the same play.
“…there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it.” Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895).
“Most people are other people.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (written 1897).
“…we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.” Oscar Wilde, as recalled by Yeats.
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.” George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904).
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” Bram Stoker, Count Dracula in Dracula (1897).
“…may your God go with you.” Dave Allen, the end of his famous TV sign-off.

Yeats recorded that Wilde line in his memoir The Trembling of the Veil (1922). It may be the most Irish sentence ever spoken.

Spike Milligan held an Irish passport through his Irish father.

His headstone in Winchelsea reads “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite”, which means “I told you I was ill”. The BBC reported that the Diocese of Chichester wouldn’t allow the joke in English, so it went on in Irish.

Famous Irish quotes that are fake

Some of the best-loved “Irish quotes” were never said by the person on the poster. The checks below come from Quote Investigator and Wikiquote.

The quote	Credited to	What the evidence says
“There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met.”	Yeats	Not in Yeats. A similar idea is in a 1915 poem by the American Edgar Guest. Irish tourism adverts used it from 1961. Yeats’s name was added in a 1997 internet post.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”	Wilde	First seen, unsigned, online in 1999, then in shop advertising in 2000.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”	Edmund Burke	Not in Burke. Close wording first appears in a 1916 speech by the Rev. Charles Aked. It was pinned on Burke in a 1920 address.
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy…”	Yeats	Not found in Yeats. First seen in 1991, when Oliver Stone used it. Author unknown.
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”	Yeats	The idea is the Greek writer Plutarch’s. Yeats’s name was added in 1987.
“Youth is wasted on the young.”	Shaw	Credited to him in a 1931 newspaper column. Never found in his writing.
“Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember.”	Shaw	A twist on Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century (1904).

What Burke really wrote is better. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) he wrote: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one”.

More lines Wilde never said

Wilde is a magnet for fakes. All of these are doubtful:

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” First credited to him in 1954.
“True friends stab you in the front.” First found in a 1955 American newspaper column.
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” Printed with no name in 1875. He may have repeated it.
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.” First printed in 1910, nearly 30 years after his US trip.

“Life is too important to be taken seriously” is a tidied-up Wilde line. In Lady Windermere’s Fan he wrote “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” The original is funnier.

Irish quotes FAQ

What is the most famous Irish quote?

There’s no official answer. Wilde’s “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” is a strong contender. So is Yeats’s “I will arise and go now”.

Did Yeats say “There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t yet met”?

No. Quote Investigator found no trace of it in Yeats. A similar idea is in a 1915 poem by the American Edgar Guest. Irish tourism adverts used it from 1961, and Yeats’s name was attached in a 1997 internet post.

Did Oscar Wilde really say “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”?

No. It first appears in 1999, almost a century after Wilde died. His real line on the subject is “Most people are other people”.

What were Seamus Heaney’s last words?

“Noli timere”, Latin for “Don’t be afraid”. He texted them to his wife Marie shortly before he died on 30 August 2013. Their son Michael shared them at the funeral. See my pick of Seamus Heaney poems.

What’s the difference between an Irish quote, a saying and a blessing?

A quote has a named author. A saying or proverb is folk wisdom nobody owns. A blessing, like “May the road rise to meet you”, is a traditional wish. For those, see my Irish sayings and Irish proverbs.