22 Quotes by Douglas Hyde

Every craggy and gnarled tree has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

The Gaelic League is founded not upon hatred of England, but upon love of Ireland. Hatred is a negative passion; it is powerful - a very powerful destroyer; but it is useless for building up. Love, on the other hand, is like faith; it can move mountains, and faith, we have mountains to move.

Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.

Englishmen have very noble and excellent qualities which I should like to see imitated here, but I should not like to imitate them in everything. I like our own habits and character better, they are more consonant to my nature; I like our own turn of thought, our own characteristics, and above all I like our own language.

In order to de-Anglicize ourselves, we must at once arrest the decay of the language. We must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves.

How many Irishmen are there who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly such a question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference between the English and Irish race. Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump to make the exchange, and I firmly believe that nine Irishmen out of ten would indignantly refuse it.

I cannot conceive a more acute pain in the power of sentiment to inflict than that which I should feel if, after a life passed in England or the colonies or India, I were to come back to my native mountains and find that the indifference or the actual discouragement of our leaders had succeeded in destroying the language of my childhood.

For the first time in Ireland within my recollection, Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, landlord and tenant, priest and parson, all work hand in hand in the interest of Ireland's life and intellectuality.