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No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.
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Florence - the city of tranquillity made manifest.
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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.
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We Irish are born dreamers; sometimes we never wake up at all, and then we're counted failures.
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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.
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It is sacrilege to attempt analysis of birth or love or death. Death and birth, the mysteries! Love, the revelation!
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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.
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Nobody is such an individualist as the man who advocates equality.
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Cynicism ... is the trade-mark of failure.
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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.
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by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!
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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.
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Of all the ills that circumstance forces upon man, separation from a beloved object is, perhaps, the most salutary. Separation is the crucible wherein love undergoes the test absolute; in the fire of loss, grief softens to indifference or hardens to enduring need.
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Light love is desire of pleasure; great love is fear of being alone.
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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.
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We have all of us the two natures - the brother and the sister! Not one of us is quite woman - not one of us is all man!
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Most prisons have wide gates!
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To give! To give without hope of recompense, without question, without fear! That was the message of life.
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A good horse is the best company in the world.
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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.