John Boyle O'Reilly Quotes

Each heart holds the secret:
'Kindness' is the word.

The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.

The success of the suffrage movement would injure women spiritually and intellectually, for they would be assuming a burden though they knew themselves unable to bear it. It is the sediment, not the wave, of a sex. It is the antithesis of that highest and sweetest mystery - conviction by submission, and conquest by sacrifice.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

A good boxer, in striking the round blow, instead of loosening body and arm, gathers himself into a heap of muscularity and begins his blow where all blows ought to begin, from the solidarity of the right foot.

The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.

Doubt is brother-devil to Despair.

Loyalty is the greatest quality of the human heart.

Every boy in a free country ought to be instructed in boxing, wrestling, and the use of weapons. Every young man ought to be drilled. Every householder ought, at least, to have a right to own a rifle, and should know how to make cartridges.

All that is worth seeing in good boxing can best be witnessed in a contest with soft gloves. Every value is called out: quickness, force, precision, foresight, readiness, pluck, and endurance. With these, the rowdy and 'rough' are not satisfied.

No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.

Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you, nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.

A dreamer lives forever, And a toiler dies in a day.

Take gifts with a sigh: most men give to be paid.

For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Too late we learn, a man must hold his friend
Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end.

The brutalities of a fight with bare hands, the crushed nasal bones, maimed lips, and other disfigurements, which call for the utter abolition of boxing in the interests of humanity, at once disappear when the contestants cover their hands with large, soft-leather gloves.

The world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide; But the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side.

Anonymity is the fame of the future.

I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other land.

When honor comes to you, be ready to take it; But reach not to seize it before it is near.

For peace do not hope; to be just you must break it. Still work for the minute and not for the year.

Who heeds not experience, trust him not.

Putting prize-fighting altogether aside as one of the unavoidable evils attending on this manly exercise, the inestimable value of boxing as a training, discipline, and development of boys and young men remains.

Well blest is he who has a dear one dead; A friend he has whose face will never change- A dear communion that will not grow strange; The anchor of a love is death.

Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings, And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill Some shallow notes from its great music brings.

With the advent of chivalry, the art of boxing waned. The evolution of feudal aristocracy, with other and widely different exercises, pastimes and weapons from those of the common people, made boxing unfashionable.

Women ought to be fully guarded by law in all rights of property, labor, profession, etc.; but, roughly stated, the voting population ought to represent the fighting population.

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul? Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?

It is heroic to prepare for war with a tyrant power. Patriots will always win the admiration of mankind for daring to meet the bloodshed of battle for their country's liberty. But the patriot who is willing to go to that sacrifice will be the first to condemn the aimless and secret shedding of blood in time of peace.

Be true to your word and your work and your friend.

They who see the Flying Dutchman never, never reach the shore.

With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fighting-man resembled an armadillo.