No first step can be really great it must of necessity possess more of prophecy than of achievement nevertheless it is by the first step that a man marks the value, not only of his cause, but of himself.

The most splendid moment of an adventure is not always the moment of fulfilment, not even the moment of conception, but the moment of first accomplishment, when the adventurer deliberately sets his face toward the new road, knowing that his boats are burned.

Enthusiasm is ever a gracious, pardonable thing, because in its essentials are youth and zeal and all high, white-hot qualities whose roots strike not in the base earth.

Most prisons have wide gates!

Light love is desire of pleasure great love is fear of being alone.

Cynicism ... is the trade-mark of failure.

To give! To give without hope of recompense, without question, without fear! That was the message of life.

Failure may be cruel, but success is crueller still. The gods are usurers, you know they lend to mortals, but they exact a desperate interest.

by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!

Nobody is such an individualist as the man who advocates equality.

An eight-mile drive over rain-washed Irish roads in the quick-falling dusk of autumn is an experience trying to the patience, even to the temper, of the average Saxon.

A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities.

Journeys end in lovers' meeting.' ... But the real journey - the journey of adventure itself - is frequently another matter: often gray, often loverless, often demanding from the secret soul of the adventurer spirit and inspiration, lest the blood turn cold in sick dismay, and the brain cloud under its weight of nostalgia.

We Irish are born dreamers sometimes we never wake up at all, and then we're counted failures.

It is sacrilege to attempt analysis of birth or love or death. Death and birth, the mysteries! Love, the revelation!