George Moore

Who was George Moore?

George Augustus Moore was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day.

As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist.

Famous Quotes:

• A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
• Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
• There is nothing so consoling as to find one's neighbor's troubles are at least as great as one's own.
• Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.
• The poor would never be able to live at all if it were not for the poor.
• The difficulty in life is the choice.
• Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
• Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.
• After all there is but one race -- humanity.
• No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.