John Millington Synge Quotations

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.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the rigging, and a small circle of foam.

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

In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

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

Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.

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.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

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.

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.

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

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

At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.

The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection.

Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.

The freedom of the sand seemed to give a stronger spirit of revolt, and some of the animals were only caught after a dangerous struggle.

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 drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

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

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.

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

All the rare and royal names Wormy sheepskin yet retains

A translation is no translation unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation -- and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.

Words, particularly in a play, should have the texture of a crisp, autumn apple.

When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servent girls in the kitchen.