Top 35 Lady Gregory Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?”

— Lady Gregory

2. “As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.”

— Lady Gregory

3. “It’s best make changes little by little, the same as you’d put clothes upon a growing child.”

— Lady Gregory

4. “There’s more learning than is taught in books.”

— Lady Gregory

5. “It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.”

— Lady Gregory

6. “I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.”

— Lady Gregory

7. “She is a girl and would not be afraid to walk the whole world with herself.”

— Lady Gregory

8. “We would not give up our own country – Ireland – if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.”

— Lady Gregory

9. “In writing a little tragedy, ‘The Gaol Gate,’ I made the scenario in three lines, ‘He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.’ I wrote that play very quickly.”

— Lady Gregory

10. “It was at Inver Slane, to the north of Leinster, the sons of Gaedhal of the Shining Armour, the Very Gentle, that were called afterwards the Sons of the Gael, made their first attempt to land in Ireland to avenge Ith, one of their race that had come there one time and had met with his death.”

— Lady Gregory

11. “It takes madness to find out madness.”

— Lady Gregory

12. “It is better to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man.”

— Lady Gregory

13. “The first play I wrote was called ‘Twenty-five.’ It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.”

— Lady Gregory

14. “Everything that is bad, the falling sickness – God save the mark – or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.”

— Lady Gregory

15. “From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.”

— Lady Gregory

16. “There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.”

— Lady Gregory

17. “The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.”

— Lady Gregory

18. “Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery’s poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.”

— Lady Gregory

19. “Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death.”

— Lady Gregory

20. “Well, there’s no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.”

— Lady Gregory

21. “Our curses on them that boil the eggs too hard! What use is an egg that is hard to any person on earth?”

— Lady Gregory

22. “It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”

— Lady Gregory

23. “What are prophecies? Don’t we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.”

— Lady Gregory

24. “Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.”

— Lady Gregory

25. “There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.”

— Lady Gregory

26. “The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.”

— Lady Gregory

Featured in: Strong Quotes

27. “Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body.”

— Lady Gregory

28. “It’s a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.”

— Lady Gregory

29. “What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning, the country people will always say ‘It is for Denmark they are crowing. Crowing they are to be back in Denmark.’”

— Lady Gregory

30. “I’ll take no charity! What I get I’ll earn by taking it. I would feel no pleasure it being given to me, any more than a huntsman would take pleasure being made a present of a dead fox, in place of getting a run across country after it.”

— Lady Gregory

31. “I don’t know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night.”

— Lady Gregory

32. “There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.”

— Lady Gregory

33. “It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.”

— Lady Gregory

34. “Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.”

— Lady Gregory

35. “Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by God.”

— Lady Gregory

36. “Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.”

— Lady Gregory