Flann O'Brien Quotes

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

It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.

still loved but deprived of grace

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

But which of us can hope to probe with questioning finger the dim thoughts that flit in a fool's head?

Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true.

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.

A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.

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.

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.

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

Recently in mixed company ... I ventured to make the claim ( not without some show of humility and modesty ) that I was the greatest living swine.

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

The first beginnings of wisdom ... is to ask questions but never to answer any.

We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders.

When money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

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

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

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

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

You may have come on no bicycle," he said, "but that does not say that you know everything.

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

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

Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?

happeinefs, what is it? lady, difterbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it?

For my sustenance at night,
the whole that my hands can glean
from the gloom of the oak-gloomed oaks
the herbs and the plenteous fruits ...

I was at a wake the other night and every man jack was drunk - even the corpse.

Another day gone and no jokes.

In Boston he met a pretty lady, fat and forty, but beautiful with the bloom of cash and collateral.

Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.

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

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

And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity.

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

Is it about a bicycle?

I am completely half afraid to think.

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

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