Seán Ó Faoláin > Quotes

“At Harvard I learned most uncomfortably that facts are facts. In Italy I learned that facts are the way you look at them.”
― Sean O'Faolain

“(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.”
― Sean O'Faolain

“My final thought now is that as in religion and the arts, so in politics; if men do not balance their feelings and intelligence they lose command of both - and worse still, of their object.”
― Sean O'Faolain

“The upshot of it has been that the spirit of the Past is now widely regarded amongst us as a purely immaterial force pumping a million times a day in the rose-pink heart of every true Irishman.”
― Seán Ó Faoláin, The Irish: A Character Study

“My final thought now is that as in religion and the arts, so in politics; if men do not balance their feelings and intelligence they lose command of both - and worse still, of their object.”
― Sean O'Faolain”
― Seán Ó Faoláin

“The Irish ‘peasant’ is the child of time. He is its guardian and its slave. He will preserve for centuries dull and foolish habits that those who neither love nor fear time or change will quickly cast aside; but he will also preserve dear, ancient habits that like wine and ivory grow more beautiful and precious with age, all jumbled with the useless lumber in that dusty cockloft which is his ancestral mind.”
― Séan O'FaoláIn, The Irish

“Ireland had clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction to the very last.”
― Seán Ó Faoláin, The Irish: A Character Study