Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

452. “And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.”

— James Joyce

453. “A dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail.”

— James Joyce

454. “When all things repose, do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone?”

— James Joyce

455. “With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do.”

— James Joyce

456. “God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.”

— James Joyce

457. “Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”

— James Joyce

458. “We’re as old as we feel, Johnny.”

— James Joyce

459. “He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

— James Joyce

460. “We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.”

— James Joyce

461. “Then I went to a certain nightclub. There were men there – and also women. At least, they looked like women.”

— James Joyce

462. “Natural parents should bear in mind that the more supplementaries their children find, at school or elsewhere, the better they will know that it takes all sorts to make a world. Also, that though there is always the risk of being corrupted by bad parents, the natural ones may be – probably ten per cent of them actually are – the worst of the lot.”

— James Joyce

463. “Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.”

— James Joyce

464. “To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.”

— James Joyce

465. “His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it.”

— James Joyce

466. “So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.”

— James Joyce

467. “Ho, you pretty man, turn aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.”

— James Joyce

468. “Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in your? Twang. It snapped.”

— James Joyce

469. “Hushkah, a horn! Gadolmagtog! God es El?”

— James Joyce

470. “Life, he himself once said... is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-winning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.”

— James Joyce

471. “And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”

— James Joyce

472. “I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.”

— James Joyce

473. “Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?”

— James Joyce

474. “The mockery of it! he said gaily.”

— James Joyce

475. “His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at leas he had been acquainted with nobility.”

— James Joyce

476. “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.”

— James Joyce

477. “You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.”

— James Joyce

478. “He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.”

— James Joyce

479. “Reefer was a wenchman.”

— James Joyce

480. “First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking.”

— James Joyce

481. “I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse.”

— James Joyce

482. “It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

— James Joyce

483. “We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts.”

— James Joyce

484. “Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.”

— James Joyce

485. “What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco !”

— James Joyce

486. “A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.”

— James Joyce

487. “Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?”

— James Joyce

488. “God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy.”

— James Joyce

489. “Will ye, ay or nay?”

— James Joyce

490. “I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility.”

— James Joyce

491. “We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kindgom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land.”

— James Joyce

492. “O, undoubtedly yes, and very potable so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?”

— James Joyce

493. “They listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine.”

— James Joyce

494. “The world is before you.”

— James Joyce

495. “Take a fool’s advice. All is not well.”

— James Joyce

496. “Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain.”

— James Joyce

497. “Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder.”

— James Joyce

498. “It is quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”

— James Joyce

499. “A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.”

— James Joyce

500. “Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.”

— James Joyce