Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.

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.'

In the whole course of our work at the theatre we have been, I may say, drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the reasons why we did not succeed... All their advice, or at least some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to make a common place of amusement.

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.

There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.

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.

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.