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James Joyce quotes

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“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real....” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Shut your eyes and see.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“Love loves to love love.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of...” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and...” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only...” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” James Joyce, “Dubliners” - 1914

“Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother?” James Joyce, “Ulysses” - 1922

“Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce, “Dubliners” - 1914

Related topics

life mother heart love time belief silence art way self reciprocity passion sweetness attraction death music conscience youth foolishness past

Related sources

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (24)
Ulysses (8)
Dubliners (2)