Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire, or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.”

— James Joyce

402. “If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

404. “He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.”

— James Joyce

405. “He had tales of distant countries.”

— James Joyce

406. “We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination.”

— James Joyce

407. “It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.”

— James Joyce

408. “But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?”

— James Joyce

409. “Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily, time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to wear the mask of holinesss before the tabernacle itself while his soul within was a living mass of corruption.”

— James Joyce

410. “YesIsaidyesyesyesyesyes... YesIsaidyes! andagainyesyesyes – Molly Bloom.”

— James Joyce

411. “In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.”

— James Joyce

412. “She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her.”

— James Joyce

413. “Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!”

— James Joyce

414. “It was hard work-a hard life-but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

— James Joyce

415. “The sad quiet grey-blue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen’s heart.”

— James Joyce

416. “No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast.”

— James Joyce

417. “Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

418. “Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.”

— James Joyce

419. “Ullahbluh! Sehyoh narar, pokehole sann! Manhead very dirty by am anoyato. Like old Dolldy Icon when he cooked up his iggs in bicon. He gatovit and me gotafit and Oalgoak’s Cheloven gut a fudden. Povar old pitschobed! Molodeztious.”

— James Joyce

420. “His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom.”

— James Joyce

421. “He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul: and at every step his soul seemed to sigh: at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.”

— James Joyce

422. “They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”

— James Joyce

423. “We are foolish, comic, motionless, corrupted, yet we are worthy of sympathy too.”

— James Joyce

424. “Let there be fight? And there was.”

— James Joyce

425. “The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures – on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.”

— James Joyce

426. “He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.”

— James Joyce

427. “A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.”

— James Joyce

428. “There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?”

— James Joyce

429. “Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all.”

— James Joyce

430. “OMNIUM GATHERUM.”

— James Joyce

431. “One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.”

— James Joyce

432. “He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already.”

— James Joyce

433. “Well, Tommy, he said, I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. And that’s the wish of a sincere friend, an old friend. You know that?”

— James Joyce

434. “If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.”

— James Joyce

435. “Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.”

— James Joyce

436. “The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shriveled soul, poignant and selfembittered.”

— James Joyce

437. “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

438. “He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died.”

— James Joyce

439. “Havvah-ban-Annah.”

— James Joyce

440. “Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”

— James Joyce

441. “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

442. “When she had gone he said, laughing: – We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. Haines opened his newbought book. – I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground. of all minds that have lost their balance.”

— James Joyce

443. “A dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail.”

— James Joyce

444. “He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

— James Joyce

445. “We’re as old as we feel, Johnny.”

— James Joyce

446. “I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.”

— James Joyce

447. “Shaw’s works make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the english.”

— James Joyce

448. “Pincushions. I’m a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all over the place. Needles in window curtains.”

— James Joyce

449. “When all things repose, do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone?”

— James Joyce

450. “And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.”

— James Joyce