An Irish Sayings

#1. Do you know that an Irishman always respond to a question with another?"
And the Irish guy replies "Who told you that?

Cathy Kelly

#2. What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.

Jonathan Swift

#3. There's an Irish blessing that I think fits well here," Kathleen said. "May love and laughter light your days, and warm your heart and home.

Julie James

#4. It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl's boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.

Stefania Mattana

#5. My family calls me Declan. But most people call me E.C. I think it comes from my dad. It's an Irish convention. You usually call the first child by the initials.

Elvis Costello

#6. World War One is an important part of Ireland's multi-layered history during which tens of thousands Irish people lost their lives.

Martin McGuinness

#7. The Board would like to come back and see you tomorrow, Ariana,' she mimicked. 'Any more questions?'
'Yes,' she answered in the Warden's Irish accent, 'I'd just like to know why I'm such an arsehole.

Claire Merle

#8. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He

Henry James

#9. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!

Rashers Tierney

#10. You think we live in Norway or something? Amir Jordan is Pakistani. There's also an Asian guy, some Puerto Ricans, and the starting left wing has, like, carrot-hair. he must be Irish. It's the whole UN over there.

Sarah Ockler

#11. My version of an Irish exit has an air of deception to it, because it includes my asking loudly, "Where's the bathroom?" and making theatrical looking-around gestures like a lost foreign tourist. But then, instead of finding the bathroom, I sneakily grab my coat and leave.

Mindy Kaling

#12. My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

Geraldine Brooks

#13. My family was very encouraging, and both of my grandparents were both beautiful singers. My grandmother was a coloratura soprano, and my grandfather was an Irish tenor in a barbershop quartet.

Clare Bowen

#14. I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."

Carl Andre

#15. Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday.

Oscar Wilde

#16. I was raised Irish Catholic and went to Holy Names Academy, an all-girl's private Catholic school. I loved the nuns there and I love them to this day.

Kitty Kelley

#17. May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. (Irish blessing)

Anonymous

#18. If you are a Northern Irish actor, maybe subconsciously more than consciously, you do have an instinctive responsibility at some point to tackle the recent history of where we have come from. It's not only a responsibility, but a privilege.

James Nesbitt

#19. An Irish wedding is a tame thing to an Irish funeral.

Mary Deasy

#20. I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Stephen Mangan

#21. Drop by Bell's for an Irish Kiss anytime. The best in England

JoAnne Kenrick

#22. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

Colm Toibin

#23. Hell, I'm not saying I'm an angel, but when it came to dirty tricks I couldn't hold a candle to the Irish Mafia.

Jimmy Hoffa

#24. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

Tim Pat Coogan

#25. An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma - now called Burkitt's lymphoma -

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#26. I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that.

Steve Coogan

#27. I never thought about becoming a professional singer, but I am in touch with Bono about releasing a musical movie. It will be about an Irish band during the '70s who are looking for fortune in Las Vegas. I should play the singer of the band but I don't want to sing in front of anybody.

Liam Neeson

#28. I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I'm an American - you know, you grow.

George Carlin

#29. Lord, you're Irish," said Will. "Can you make things that don't have potatoes in them? We had an Irish cook once when I was a boy. Potato pie, potato custard, potatoes with potato sauce ...

Cassandra Clare

#30. Fookin' Irish, they're a race of political masochists, they love their fookin' chiefs and princes an' a strong hand belting. It's like the man said in the play, Abair and focal republic i nGaoluinn?

Gwyneth Jones

#31. I'm still an Irish republican; I absolutely believe in Irish unity and am working to achieve that. But over the course of 15 years or more, people like myself and others have been working to end the vicious cycle of conflict.

Martin McGuinness

#32. I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

Colm Meaney

#33. The Irish Catholic side was married to the life of an actor and I found out acting could be a form of prayer.

Liam Neeson

#34. As long as Ireland is unfree the only honourable attitude for Irish men, women to have is an attitude of rebellion.

Patrick Pearse

#35. As in the old Irish blessing, may God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile. For every care, a promise; a blessing for every trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for every prayer.

Sandra D. Bricker

#36. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

Edgar Meyer

#37. There is an Irish way of paying compliments as though they were irresistible truths which makes what would otherwise be an impertinence delightful.

Katharine Tynan

#38. There can be no such things as an Irish nationalist accepting the loyalist veto and partition. You cannot claim to be an Irish nationalist if you consent to an internal six county settlement and if you are willing to negotiate the state of Irish society with a foreign government.

Gerry Adams

#39. In 1953 there were two ways for an Irish Catholic boy to impress his parents: become a priest or attend Notre Dame.

Phil Donahue

#40. For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

John F. Kerry

#41. I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.

Regina Spektor

#42. I am an Irishman, sir." "Irish Irish?" "Yes, sir.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#43. I'm an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.

William Devane

#44. For an Irish-Catholic boy with a nudity hang-up, it was an island of terrible freedom in a sea of No.

John Valentine

#45. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

James Joyce

#46. I've been told I have an Irish temper, I know I have Scottish thrift, and, like the English, I love a good show.

Jeanette MacDonald

#47. For a man to come right out and say he does not believe in the Old Testament, I think many Catholics across the nation as well as the world are offended by Bill O'Reilly claiming he's an Irish Catholic.

Stephen Bennett

#48. Dead men hear no tales; posthumous fame is an Irish bull.

Israel Zangwill

#49. I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken; the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.

John Hurt

#50. I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother's side there's a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.

Adelaide Kane

#51. My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.

Ellen Pompeo

#52. It was an incredible effort by the Irish down in Tallahassee. Jameis Winston was too tough in the second half; congrats to the Seminoles.

Dick Vitale

#53. The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned ... THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer.

Ken Bruen

#54. There was a dark aura about him, a hint of caged power in that deceptively casual, sprawled poise. Danger personified.
If this had been a film she would have expected to hear the warning wail of an electric guitar creep over the soft background bustle of the city.

Heather R. Blair

#55. Consider Ireland ... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

Benjamin Disraeli

#56. A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

William Nicholson

#57. Author relates the reaction of an Irish village to a landowner who tried to raise rents on the land's occupants. The villagers refused to talk to or trade with the man, whose name was Captain Boycott.

Patrick N. Allitt

#58. It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.

Tana French

#59. Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I'm an Irish man.

Conor McGregor

#60. Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

Bharati Mukherjee

#61. I had an Irish Catholic education. Horrible nuns, vindictive and cruel.

John Lydon

#62. I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

James Comey

#63. Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

W.B.Yeats

#64. May you always have A sunbeam to warm you, A moonbeam to charm you, A sheltering angel so nothing can harm you. An Irish Blessing

Julie Garwood

#65. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.

Rashers Tierney

#66. For my last meal, I'd want an Irish breakfast with soda bread and one of my dad's omelettes with three or four eggs.

Erin O'Connor

#67. She hated funeral homes with their thick carpets and elegantly appointed decor. She would much prefer an all-out Irish wake where everyone drank too much Guinness and brawls broke out. That's how the dead should be honored- with life and all of it's warts.

Elizabeth Meyette

#68. In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#69. We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.

Henry A. Kissinger

#70. I have a difficult time doing an Irish accent; even now, it kind of fades slowly into Scottish.

Robin Williams

#71. Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From an Irish headstone

Richard Puz

#72. I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.

Harrison Ford

#73. For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or 'the Wandering Jew'.

William Dalrymple

#74. It's an amazingly consistent thing with Irish people. We will talk to strangers at parties for hours. It's what we were bred to do I think. And the Jewish people were bred to write the stuff that we say.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#75. Yelling Irish, you can sound like an angry Leprechaun.

Norman Reedus

#76. Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

Edna O'Brien

#77. I'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

Sebastian Coe

#78. This was like National Lampoon's Vacation, but with death, property destruction, and an Irish accent.

Abigail Roux

#79. As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.

Dylan Moran

#80. My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.

John Collison

#81. The fact is that most 'Irish-Americans', in spite of dropping the word 'Irish' into half of all sentences, couldn't find Europe on an atlas, let alone Ireland.

Ian Watson

#82. I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously.

Rachel Miner

#83. Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse? ("Novelty")

John Crowley

#84. I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

Edna O'Brien

#85. Making it [St. Patrick's Day] a great day for the Irish, but just an ok day if you're looking for a quiet tavern to talk, read or have a white wine spritzer.

Jon Stewart

#86. There's an energy that hangs between strangers even in a crowd.

Claire Fullerton

#87. What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out.

John Gimlette

#88. The title, the name Frank, comes from this extraordinary British character Frank Friedbottom. He was very big in Britain in the '80s, but I, as an Irish kid, saw him on 'Top of the Charts.'

Lenny Abrahamson

#89. I'm a big fan of the Irish accent. After a couple of drinks, I start to get a bit of an Irish lilt, too.

Emily Ratajkowski

#90. I remember a story about an Irish warrior who killed his son by mistake but when he realised he didn't mind that much because it served the son right.

Max Porter

#91. Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

James Cagney

#92. Did you know you can have an Irish abortion, but there is a 12 month waiting list?

Frank Carson

#93. When I was 14, I almost had a big green leprechaun tattooed on my forearm. Thank God I didn't - it would have been a nightmare to cover up as an actor. I went with a group of mates and, being Irish, thought a leprechaun would be perfect.

Jonas Armstrong

#94. Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it.

John Kinsella

#95. Sinn Fein is an Irish Republican party. We stood in the Assembly election to deliver a prosperous economy and jobs, to protect and enhance public services, support those most in need, and to progress Irish Unity.

Martin McGuinness

#96. Lost: Heartbeat. Last seen being chased away by an Irishman's shameless grin. Reward if returned.

Whitney K.E.

#97. Yes, I am an Irish lass through and through.

Erin Andrews

#98. My heart fluttered on Kaylee's behalf. Being called lovely in an Irish accent ... well that's swoonworthy stuff, take my word for it.

Katrina Abbott

#99. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.

Kate Atkinson

#100. I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.

Lord Dunsany