Explore Quotes by James Joyce

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

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

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

[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.

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.

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

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

Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.