Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Shut your eyes and see.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Imagination Quotes

2. “There are no friends like the old friends.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Friendship Quotes

3. “Life is too short to read a bad book.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes

4. “Love loves to love love.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Silly Quotes, Romantic Quotes, Happy Valentine's Day Quotes, Love of My Life Quotes, Short Love Quotes for Him

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Mistake Quotes, Genius Quotes

6. “They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Humble Quotes

8. “Absence, the highest form of presence.”

— James Joyce

9. “There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

11. “As I am. As I am. All or not at all.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

13. “Fall if you will, but rise you must.”

— James Joyce

14. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

— James Joyce

15. “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.”

— James Joyce

16. “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.”

— James Joyce

17. “When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.”

— James Joyce

18. “Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

— James Joyce

19. “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.”

— James Joyce

20. “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

22. “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

— James Joyce

23. “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

— James Joyce

24. “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.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes

25. “Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”

— James Joyce

26. “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.”

— James Joyce

27. “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.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Real Quotes, Adventure Quotes

28. “In the particular is contained the universal.”

— James Joyce

29. “Life is the great teacher.”

— James Joyce

30. “God made food; the devil the cooks.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Imagination Quotes

32. “Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.”

— James Joyce

33. “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

— James Joyce

34. “I don’t want to die. Damn death. Long live life.”

— James Joyce

35. “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.”

— James Joyce

36. “The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Artist Quotes

38. “There’s many a true word spoken in jest.”

— James Joyce

39. “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own.”

— James Joyce

40. “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.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Heaven Quotes

42. “Every bond is a bond to sorrow.”

— James Joyce

43. “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

— James Joyce

44. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Flower Quotes

45. “Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.”

— James Joyce

46. “We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.”

— James Joyce

47. “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

— James Joyce

48. “His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.”

— James Joyce

49. “Signatures of all things I am here to read.”

— James Joyce

50. “Let my country die for me.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Country Quotes