Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

153. “Thought is the thought of thought.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

156. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

159. “If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.”

— James Joyce

160. “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

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

— James Joyce

162. “La gente aguantaba que les mordiera un lobo pero lo que verdaderamente les sacaba de quicio era que les mordiera una oveja.”

— James Joyce

163. “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

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

— James Joyce

165. “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

166. “I’ll tickle his catastrophe.”

— James Joyce

167. “All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

169. “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

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

— James Joyce

171. “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

172. “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

179. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

182. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

185. “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

186. “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.”

— James Joyce

187. “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

188. “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

189. “Redheaded women buck like goats.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

192. “White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.”

— James Joyce

193. “His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”

— James Joyce

194. “I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”

— James Joyce

195. “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”

— James Joyce

196. “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

— James Joyce

197. “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, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird’s heart?”

— James Joyce

198. “Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.”

— James Joyce

199. “Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.”

— James Joyce

200. “When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.”

— James Joyce