The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Like dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.Literary and Other Notes I, Woman’s World （November 1887）
Why was I born with such contemporaries
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go.
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
A poet can service everything but a misprint.
I think that God, in creating Man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
The well bred contradict other people.The wise contradict themselves.
We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.