James Joyce is among the 20th century's most celebrated and influential authors.
His unique writing style has inspired generations of readers and writers worldwide. His works, such as 'Ulysses', 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man', and 'Dubliners', are renowned for their symbolism, stream-of-consciousness narrative style, and clever observation of modern life in a rapidly changing world.
Joyce's colorful life and varied works provide an abundance of thought-provoking quotes that address topics and issues relevant to people of all ages and backgrounds. This article presents 110 interesting quotes from James Joyce, from his creative musings on life and art to his wise words of advice and observations of the human condition.
James Joyce Quotes On Life And Death
Joyce had many profound thoughts about life and death. Read ahead to know more about these quotes!
"There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."
"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." - 'The Dead'
"The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age." - 'The Dead'
"As you are now, so once were we."
"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past." - 'Ulysses'
"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." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"As I am. As I am. All or not at all." - 'Ulysses'
"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." - 'An Encounter'
"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 defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours."- 'Ulysses'
"You can still die when the sun is shining." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"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." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past."- 'Ulysses'
"When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart."
"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."- 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born."- 'Ulysses' 16
James Joyce Quotes On Love
James Joyce's writings have inspired many across generations. Read on to know what Joyce thinks about love.
"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is, in fact, so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself."
"Love loves to love love."
"Your love has passed through me, and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange, uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music." - 'Selected Letters of James Joyce'
"They lived and laughed and loved and left."
"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, happy in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?"- 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses."- 'Ulysses'
"First, we feel. Then we fall." - 'Finnegans Wake'
" First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop."- 'Ulysses'
"What's yours is mine, and what's mine is my own."- 'Ulysses'
"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes, and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower, and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me."- 'Ulysses'
"I think of you so often you have no idea." - 'Ulysses'
"I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world, and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence."- 'Cartas de amor a Nora Barnacle'
"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not."- 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"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 revelry, he had heard their tale before."- 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody, but God loves everybody." - 'Ulysses'
"Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory." - 'The Dead'
"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." - 'Araby'
"But my body was like a harp, and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
"Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech, and between them, he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor."- 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me." - 'Ulysses'
"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" - 'The Dead' 21
James Joyce Quotes On Education
Read to know what Joyce said about education and wisdom.
"Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it."
"Sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.." - 'The Dead'
"Children must be educated by love, not punishment."
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why." 4
James Joyce Quotes On Writing
Learn about the quotes Joyce said about writing.
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."
"To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end."
"When one reads these strange pages of one long gone, one feels that one is at one with one who once…." - 'Ulysses'
"Life is too short to read a bad book."
"The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - 'Ulysses'
"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." - 'Ulysses'
"Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance." - 'Ulysses'
"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."
"Shut your eyes and see."
"I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me."
"The important thing is not what we write but how we write and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be."
Miscellaneous James Joyce Quotes
Born on February 2, 1882, Joyce was considered to be one of the most influential writers in the 20th century. Here are more miscellaneous quotes by James Joyce that you can enjoy if you can't get enough of him.
"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home." - 'Ulysses'
"Too excited to be genuinely happy." - 'Dubliners'
"I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end." - 'Ulysses'
"You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too." - ‘A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’
"Let my country die for me." - 'Ulysses'
"I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?" - 'Ulysses'
"We cannot give ourselves; it said: we are our own." - 'Dubliners'
"Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low." - 'Finnegans Wake'
"The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside."- 'Ulysses'
"My heart is quite calm now. I will go back." - 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
"Every bond is a bond to sorrow."
"He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place." - 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
"Thought is the thought of thought." - 'Ulysses'
"Gazing up into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." - 'Araby'
"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude." - 'Dubliners'
"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well, and what's cheese? Corpse of milk." - 'Ulysses'
"My mouth is full of decayed teeth, and my soul of decayed ambitions."
"This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am."
"If it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness."
"What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds."
"The heaven tree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."
“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
"Be just before you are generous."
"What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?"
"Time is, time was, but time shall be no more."
"Me. And me now."
"While you have a thing, it can be taken from you…..but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give."
"I am other I now."
"What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
"I'll tickle his catastrophe."
"You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?"
"Secrets, silent, stony, sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
"Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear."
"There's no friends like the old friends."
"He was alone and young and wilful and wild-hearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."
"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."
"Ask no questions, and you'll hear no lies."
"In the particular is contained the universal."
"People could put up with being bitten by a wolf, but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep." - 'Ulysses'
"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church." - 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man'
"Absence, the highest form of presence."
"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light."
"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - 'Ulysses'
