Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.”

— James Joyce

252. “He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.”

— James Joyce

253. “And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

255. “Reproduction is the beginning of death.”

— James Joyce

256. “Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.”

— James Joyce

257. “Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul.”

— James Joyce

258. “It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

— James Joyce

259. “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

260. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

263. “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

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

— James Joyce

265. “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

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

— James Joyce

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— James Joyce

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— James Joyce

278. “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

279. “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

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

— James Joyce

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

286. “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

287. “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

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

— James Joyce

289. “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

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

— James Joyce

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— James Joyce

296. “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

297. “I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”

— James Joyce

298. “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

299. “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

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

— James Joyce