Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Reproduction is the beginning of death.”

— James Joyce

252. “He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.”

— James Joyce

253. “He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

— James Joyce

254. “I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.”

— James Joyce

255. “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.”

— James Joyce

256. “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”

— James Joyce

257. “Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet.”

— James Joyce

258. “You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.”

— James Joyce

259. “His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed.”

— James Joyce

260. “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.”

— James Joyce

261. “I am caught in this burning scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.”

— James Joyce

262. “An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.”

— James Joyce

263. “The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare’s hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.”

— James Joyce

264. “Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.”

— James Joyce

265. “I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.”

— James Joyce

266. “Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.”

— James Joyce

267. “Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: – That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! – What? Mr Deasy asked. – A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.”

— James Joyce

268. “Tell me. Tell me with your eyes.”

— James Joyce

269. “Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.”

— James Joyce

270. “Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.”

— James Joyce

271. “King Solomon says in Proverbs that there is nothing new under the sun.”

— James Joyce

272. “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.”

— James Joyce

273. “He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.”

— James Joyce

274. “Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.”

— James Joyce

275. “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut!”

— James Joyce

276. “The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”

— James Joyce

277. “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul?”

— James Joyce

278. “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”

— James Joyce

279. “From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.”

— James Joyce

280. “His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.”

— James Joyce

281. “O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?”

— James Joyce

282. “Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.”

— James Joyce

283. “The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton – Parnell – never a man.”

— James Joyce

284. “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.”

— James Joyce

285. “He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.”

— James Joyce

286. “It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?”

— James Joyce

287. “Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.”

— James Joyce

288. “He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?”

— James Joyce

289. “He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.”

— James Joyce

290. “He longed to be master of her strange mood.”

— James Joyce

291. “He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.”

— James Joyce

292. “A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth? The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating. – That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. – Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that.”

— James Joyce

293. “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

— James Joyce

294. “Haines sat down to pour out the tea. – I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don’t you? Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman’s wheedling voice: – When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.”

— James Joyce

295. “He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

— James Joyce

296. “A headland, a ship, a sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the wind upon the headland, wind around her.”

— James Joyce

297. “Kyrie ! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind.”

— James Joyce

298. “He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”

— James Joyce

299. “His words were then these as followeth: Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis cam ad te veniet.”

— James Joyce

300. “A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.”

— James Joyce