It's a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.

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.

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.

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.'

There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child.