386 Quotes by James Joyce
(Page 4 of 4)

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

The studious silence of the library ... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

What was after the universe?

Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.

Do you know what Ireland is?' asked Stephen with cold violence. 'Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

Love me. Love my umbrella.

There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o'clock, and start writing at once.

Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute.
Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick.
Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.

Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.

Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
teacher.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

Love loves to love love.

If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

Your battles inspired me -- not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

Men are governed by lines of intellect -- women: by curves of emotion.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

Life is the great teacher.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.