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.

The saddest human experience is to view alone the scenes one has viewed through other eyes - to walk solitary where one has walked in company - to have its particular barbed shaft aimed at one from every stick and stone that mark familiar ways.

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.

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

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.

No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.

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