Top 40 Flann O'Brien Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Another day gone and no jokes.”

— Flann O'Brien

2. “Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.”

— Flann O'Brien

3. “A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let’s emulate that wise old bird.”

— Flann O'Brien

4. “What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.”

— Flann O'Brien

5. “Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

— Flann O'Brien

6. “The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.”

— Flann O'Brien

7. “Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.”

— Flann O'Brien

8. “Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop.”

— Flann O'Brien

9. “It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.”

— Flann O'Brien

10. “I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.”

— Flann O'Brien

11. “The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of “gathering”.”

— Flann O'Brien

12. “Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?”

— Flann O'Brien

13. “Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.”

— Flann O'Brien

14. “I am completely half afraid to think.”

— Flann O'Brien

15. “Is it about a bicycle?”

— Flann O'Brien

16. “Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching? Do they run up the steps of strange houses, pretend they live there and force their way into the hall while you are passing by? If this is the sort of person you are, you must avail yourself today of this new service. Otherwise, you might as well be dead.”

— Flann O'Brien

17. “I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.”

— Flann O'Brien

18. “Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places.”

— Flann O'Brien

19. “The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered.”

— Flann O'Brien

20. “He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

— Flann O'Brien

21. “A grain of knowledge with the dawning of the day is a breakfast of the mind.”

— Flann O'Brien

22. “There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.”

— Flann O'Brien

23. “Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.”

— Flann O'Brien

24. “I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.”

— Flann O'Brien

25. “It is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can’t quite follow you.”

— Flann O'Brien

26. “Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.”

— Flann O'Brien

27. “For all things change, making way for each other.”

— Flann O'Brien

28. “Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.”

— Flann O'Brien

29. “The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.”

— Flann O'Brien

30. “He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable inexactitudes.”

— Flann O'Brien

31. “A woman doesn’t care if she hasn’t a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn’t.”

— Flann O'Brien

32. “To say there is a time and a place for everything is trite, but the truth of the sentiment is not to be denied for all that; one could play the accordion while having a bath but probably nobody has ever tried to do that.”

— Flann O'Brien

33. “Tuesday had come down through Dundrum and Foster Avenue, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sun-drench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling. Small house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without fear on imaginary trapezes in the lime-light of the sun-slants.”

— Flann O'Brien

34. “You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?”

— Flann O'Brien

35. “When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.”

— Flann O'Brien

36. “The long evening had made its way into the barrack through the windows, creating mysteries everywhere, erasing the seam between one thing and another, lengthening out the floors and either thinning the air or putting some refinement on my ear enabling me to hear for the first time the clicking of a cheap clock from the kitchen.”

— Flann O'Brien

37. “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

— Flann O'Brien

38. “The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect.”

— Flann O'Brien

39. “Thoughts which have no chance of succeeding do not take the trouble to come into your head at all.”

— Flann O'Brien

40. “Supposing you are a lady so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at.”

— Flann O'Brien

41. “We must invert our conception of repose and activity, he continued. We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders. This might be done quickly – a five-mile race at full tilt around the town and then back to bed and the kingdom of the shadows.”

— Flann O'Brien

42. “The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.”

— Flann O'Brien

43. “Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.”

— Flann O'Brien

44. “What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?”

— Flann O'Brien