Top 1200 Great Irish Quotes & Sayings

My kids are Irish; I want them to grow up playing Gaelic football and learning Irish.

For me, a story begins with music: I feel the rhythm, the cadence, the pulse of the characters and their voices and the setting. Because I had just finished writing a book called 'Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine,' I was already filled with the music of the lives and culture of the Irish people, so I thought, why not use it?

I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish.

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.

I feel warm toward my Irish side, but I don't know the country or the people. Hearing a traditional Irish fiddle, I feel very connected to Ireland, but that's a nostalgia many people feel who aren't Irish at all.

All my family look Irish. They act Irish. My sister even has red hair... it's crazy. I'm the one that doesn't seem Irish. None of the kids in my family, my siblings, speak with an Irish accent... we've never lived there full-time; we weren't born there. We just go there once or twice a year. It's weird. Our parents sound Irish, but we don't.

Irish folk is probably the biggest influence musically that I've ever had. My mother's Irish. And when I was very young, both my brothers were very into traditional music, English and Irish. They were always playing music, so I was always brought up with it.

Being Irish and a citizen of the world, has made me truly appreciate Irish culture, music and history. Whether you're first, second generation Irish or even with no connection to Ireland, you should visit in 2013 for a unique experience.

Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

The Danes and the Irish have a great simpatico, that's for sure.

It is not blood that makes you Irish but a willingness to be part of the Irish Nation.

Irish tory employers hid[e] their sweatshops behind orange flags, and Irish home rule landlords us[e] the green sunburst of Erin to cloak their rack-renting in the festering slums of our Irish towns.

I'm a big fan of the Irish accent. After a couple of drinks, I start to get a bit of an Irish lilt, too.

The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue.

I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.

An Irish wedding is a tame thing to an Irish funeral.

The fact is that most 'Irish-Americans', in spite of dropping the word 'Irish' into half of all sentences, couldn't find Europe on an atlas, let alone Ireland.

Irish nationalists can never be the assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation. The two nation theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy.

Irish is harder to pull off. I know southern people and I really like the midwest, so I can tap into that a little bit. It's easier to sound angry with southern than it is Irish. Yelling Irish you can sound like an angry Leprechaun. I think me screaming like I am going to kill you in Irish doesn't work.

In the spirit of the Irish people, Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass!

I wasn't embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days. Modern electronica isn't what you think of when you think of Irish music.

Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

My mom's family was 100 percent Irish, in the American way of being Irish, and then my dad was half Irish.

I'm Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That's always been important, for me. I'm an actor who's Irish, not an Irish actor.

The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think.

I'm proud of my Irish heritage and culture and this show will feature a lot of Irish dancing.

I'm honoured and delighted to be named the 'Irish Times'/Irish Sports Council Sportswoman of the Year 2014. This has been an amazing year for me and for Irish women in sport, and I would like to congratulate all the finalists in their respective fields who have excelled at major sporting events.

I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.

I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.

I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish, Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing.

I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.

Throughout my childhood, I did a form of Irish dancing that was kind of the precursor to 'Riverdance.' It was a mixture of ballet and Irish dancing that my teacher, Patricia Mulholland, had invented, essentially. It was Irish ballet, and she would create performances based around the myths and legends of Ireland.

There might well have been an Irish great-great-grandfather of mine back then in the 1800s.

My great, great grandfather, Michael O'Hanson, fled the impending potato famine of Ireland and arrived in America in the early 1840s with his bride, Bridget. They headed for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and a mecca for Irish-Catholic immigrants then.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

I've got that Irish thing going on. Lots of Irish in my background.

My background is Protestant so I benefited from the great Bible teaching that was provided there... I did love the more culturally classical things, like Irish music, which I think is some of the most congregational-style music when you think of... 'St. Patrick's Breastplate' (and) 'Danny Boy.' These are traditional Irish melodies. I think being brought up there (Ireland) gave me a sense of melody that is very attuned to congregational singing.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish.

Patrick Pearse - who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin - is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish.

For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.

Inherently in us as Irish people, wherever you are in the world, when you hear an Irish accent, it's like a moth to a flame. There's a real personable pride and camaraderie about being Irish.

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

I've always been conscious of the fact that there aren't enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there.

I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

I do a lot of dialects in my act, including Irish, because I grew up in a neighbourhood that was predominantly Irish and Italian.

The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.

When I get a very generous introduction like that I explain that I'm emotionally moved, but on the other hand I'm Irish and the Irish are very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer commercials.

The Irish are great talkers and incredibly friendly, it's just in the DNA.

My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish.

There can be no such things as an Irish nationalist accepting the loyalist veto and partition. You cannot claim to be an Irish nationalist if you consent to an internal six county settlement and if you are willing to negotiate the state of Irish society with a foreign government.

It is sufficient to say, what everybody knows to be true, that the Irish population is Catholic, and that the Protestants, whether of the Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church, or of both united, are a small minority of the Irish people.

Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on.

The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).