James Joyce Quotes

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

Shut your eyes and see.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

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

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

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

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.

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.

Fall if you will, but rise you must.

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

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

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

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

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

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

Love me. Love my umbrella.

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.

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 loves to love love.

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

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

You can still die when the sun is shining.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Thought is the thought of thought.

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

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

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.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

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

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

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.

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

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.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

Every life is in 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.

There's no friends like the old friends.

I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.

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

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.

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

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