Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, for he will be going out on a day when he shouldn't.

They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

We are no longer the knights who say Ni! We are now the knights who say ekki-ekki-ekki-pitang-zoom-boing!

We all struggle. It's just that some of us struggle out loud and some of us don't.

Light is colder when there are parts of it missing.

Granted, not all uneducated women are prostitutes, and, not all prostitutes are uneducated. However, where building a family is employment, an uneducated woman's womb is her diploma.

I would say probably Pirates of Silicon Valley just because I'm proud of the work, playing Gates.

The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

History thus becomes largely a study of character. Insight into temperament is hardly less important than the probing of "original materials."

I like people who try to do big things.

The mind is never more highly gratified than in contemplating a natural landscape.

One of the reasons I wanted to teach deaf children was because it made me very sad that they spoke so clumsily and that they moved with less grace that I knew was possible of deaf people.