Katherine Cecil Thurston quotes:

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

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.

Most prisons have wide gates!

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.

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

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

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.

A good horse is the best company in the world.

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.

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.

Florence - the city of tranquillity made manifest ...

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.

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

A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities.

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

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

in this curious world there are certain beings to whom it is given to say of all things with naïve faith, not 'I shall seek,' but 'I shall find.

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.

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.

No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.

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

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!