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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.

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Most quoted on saint patrick's day:

The recent market run-up that appreciated run-of-the-mill shares also chanced to send up those token gold holdings. Pure luck, undeserved and unlikely to reoccur. Good questions outrank easy answers.

Paul Samuelson

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

Sallust The Cyclopaedia of Practical Quotations: English and Latin (1894)

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

Dejan Stojanovic

Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.

Alastair Reynolds House of Suns (2008)

Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.

Jay Lake The Decaying Mansions of Memory (2011)

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

Kahlil Gibran Sand and Foam (1926)

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

William Least Heat-Moon Blue Highways (1982)

And so it ends,
We who were lovers may be friends.
I have some weeks in which to steel
My heart and teach myself to feel
Only a sober tenderness
Where once was passion's loveliness.

Vita Sackville-West

All the good are friends of one another.

Zeno of Citium

Those who boast of friendship with us, they can really be our friend when they respect our independence, our soil and our prideful traditions.

Hafizullah Amin Beverley Male (1982)

If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

Diogenes of Sinope

“How long have we been friends, Dan?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.”

Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space (2000)

The one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.
It was generally simpler that way.

Alastair Reynolds Chasm City (2001)

From a distance you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance I just cannot comprehend
What all this war is for.

Julie Gold

Jeremiah was a bull frog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine.

Hoyt Axton Joy To The World (1971)

It's a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young.

Walt Disney EPCOT promotional film (1966)

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness (1990)

If you want to keep a friend never test him.

John Steinbeck The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Chance, another word for destiny.

Philip José Farmer The Dark Design (1977)

When the first just and friendly man appeared on the earth, from that day a fatal Waterloo was visible for all the men of pride and fraud and blood.

Charles Fletcher Dole The Coming People (1897)

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