O friend! O best of friends! Thy absence more
Than the impending night darkens the landscape o'er!
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:
Call you that backing of your friends? A plague upon such backing! give me them that will face me.
When did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
The poor make no new friends;
But oh, they love the better still
The few our Father sends.
Then came your new friend: you began to change—
I saw it and grieved.
The rest of the crowd were friends of my fortune, not of me.