George A. Moore

“England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.”

“Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.”

“An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.”

“You will find in me a middle aged man with a career behind me sufficiently brilliant to enable me to talk about many things interestingly; and I am not an unkindly soul, I believe.”

“To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?”

“The difficulty in life is the choice.”

“'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.”

“Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?”

“I do not believe in a universal religion any more than I believe in a universal language. My feeling is that people have to make their own religion as they have to make their arts and their parishes, and that they must find their own salvation; the salvation mongers are of not much avail.”

“Dublin dwindles so beautifully; there is no harsh separation between it and the country. It fades away, whereas London seems to devour the country; an army of buildings come and take away a beautiful park, and you never seem to get quite out of sight of a row of houses.”

“Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.”

“The right I claim is that of every human being to speak what he believes to be the truth to whomever he may meet on his way.”

“Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.”

“A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.”

“Isn't it strange that religious prejudices - beliefs none possess, not even the saints, so they have lamented - divide brothers and sons from their fathers. You see, I except mothers and sisters; the female is not a religious animal. If she were, the world would have ceased long ago.”

“Some men spend their lives watching bees and ants, noting down the habits of these insects; my pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally necessary, for the world would perish were it to become entirely selfish or entirely unselfish.”

“Men never get free from morality, only women.”

“The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.”

“Every race gets the religion it deserves, and only as policemen, pugilists, and priests have they succeeded, here and there a successful lawyer, but nothing more serious.”

“Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.”