Saint Patrick's Day Quotes
No Irish collection sits under this page. It comes from two others, luck and friendship, which is about as close as a mechanical match can get to a day of toasts. The luck page leans on Seneca, Livy and Shakespeare, and on Horace’s complaint about Fortune, so expect fortune in the Roman sense rather than the four-leaf kind.
Two of its entries, from Torquato Tasso, are flagged misattributed. If you want an Irish writer, use the search box. Wilde and Shaw are both on the site.
Most quoted on saint patrick's day:
Oh, call it by some better name,
For friendship sounds too cold.
A sudden thought strikes me,—let us swear an eternal friendship.
Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade.
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
Fortune knows,
We scorn her most, when most she offers blows.
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.
Neuer thinke you fortune can beare the sway,
Where Virtue's force, can cause her to obay.
She that asks
Her dear five hundred friends, contemns them all,
And hates their coming.
'Tis great Confidence in a Friend to tell him your Faults, greater to tell him his.
True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world.