Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”

— James Joyce

152. “If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.”

— James Joyce

153. “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.”

— James Joyce

154. “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. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

— James Joyce

155. “I am proud to be an emotionalist.”

— James Joyce

156. “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.”

— James Joyce

157. “Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.”

— James Joyce

158. “The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved-loved and possessed. Her lover’s arms are round her: and she is silent.”

— James Joyce

159. “The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.”

— James Joyce

160. “Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”

— James Joyce

161. “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times.”

— James Joyce

162. “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?”

— James Joyce

163. “One feels that one is listening to thought-tormented music.”

— James Joyce

164. “The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.”

— James Joyce

165. “There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.”

— James Joyce

166. “He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.”

— James Joyce

167. “Tenors get women by the score.”

— James Joyce

168. “There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”

— James Joyce

169. “There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.”

— James Joyce

170. “If we were all suddenly somebody else.”

— James Joyce

171. “Thought is the thought of thought.”

— James Joyce

172. “The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.”

— James Joyce

173. “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: and 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.”

— James Joyce

174. “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.”

— James Joyce

175. “Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.”

— James Joyce

176. “I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.”

— James Joyce

177. “No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand.”

— James Joyce

178. “Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.”

— James Joyce

179. “All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.”

— James Joyce

180. “Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”

— James Joyce

181. “Couldn’t they invent something automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?”

— James Joyce

182. “I’ll tickle his catastrophe.”

— James Joyce

183. “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh?”

— James Joyce

184. “The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal.”

— James Joyce

185. “Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me.”

— James Joyce

186. “Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!”

— James Joyce

187. “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.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

189. “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.”

— James Joyce

190. “Ineluctable modality of the visible...”

— James Joyce

191. “Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?”

— James Joyce

192. “Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs a gross if we are, about to believe.”

— James Joyce

193. “No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

— James Joyce

194. “He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.”

— James Joyce

195. “Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self.”

— James Joyce

196. “What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?”

— James Joyce

197. “She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri...”

— James Joyce

198. “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

199. “What did it proft a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul?”

— James Joyce

200. “Life is many days. This will end.”

— James Joyce