Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”

— James Joyce

152. “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

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

— James Joyce

154. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

159. “Tenors get women by the score.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

163. “Thought is the thought of thought.”

— James Joyce

164. “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

165. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

170. “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

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

— James Joyce

172. “I’ll tickle his catastrophe.”

— James Joyce

173. “All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

176. “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

177. “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

179. “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

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

— James Joyce

181. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

187. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the –.”

— James Joyce

188. “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level:.”

— James Joyce

189. “So beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf.”

— James Joyce

190. “God and morality and religion come first.”

— James Joyce

191. “It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.”

— James Joyce

192. “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.”

— James Joyce

193. “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”

— James Joyce

194. “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.”

— James Joyce

195. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

— James Joyce

196. “Unsheathe your dagger definitions; Horseness is the Whatness of All Horse...”

— James Joyce

197. “Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

— James Joyce

198. “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.”

— James Joyce

199. “As you are now so once were we.”

— James Joyce

200. “And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.”

— James Joyce