The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Flann O’Brien

I think it is true to say only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks ( or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself.

Only serfs or ex-serfs find it necessary to draw up a statement of their ‘rights’.

Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.

dishonesty, honesty, humanity-and-society, theives

Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. 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 good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

death, last-lines, suicide, three

Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.‘If you follow them’, said the Sergeant, ‘you will save your soul and never get a fall on a slippery road.

rules, rules-to-live-by, wisdom

My father…was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.

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.

humanity, mortality, soul

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?””That is about the size of it,” said the Sergeant.I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.

gallows-humour, humor, humour

A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.

A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.