Top 40 Joyce Cary Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.”

— Joyce Cary

2. “All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.”

— Joyce Cary

3. “It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know – and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.”

— Joyce Cary

4. “To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it’s true. It’s a new world every heart beat.”

— Joyce Cary

5. “No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year.”

— Joyce Cary

6. “The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm.”

— Joyce Cary

7. “I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.”

— Joyce Cary

8. “A perfect God is the creation of a conceited man.”

— Joyce Cary

9. “Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.”

— Joyce Cary

10. “Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.”

— Joyce Cary

11. “A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”

— Joyce Cary

12. “Love doesn’t grow on trees like apples in Eden – it’s something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too...”

— Joyce Cary

13. “The will is never free – it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car – it can’t steer.”

— Joyce Cary

14. “No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.”

— Joyce Cary

15. “The fear of hell, the punishment of sin, how the modern parent revolts from such teaching. Yet I will assert that far from doing us children harm, it was a sure foundation to the world of our confidence, a master girder in our palace of delight.”

— Joyce Cary

16. “A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.”

— Joyce Cary

17. “The principal fact of life is the free mind.”

— Joyce Cary

18. “I had come at last and my heart was beating again strongly to a heart that could not know despair because it forgot itself in the duty of its love.”

— Joyce Cary

19. “People don’t use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.”

— Joyce Cary

20. “Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.”

— Joyce Cary

21. “I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.”

— Joyce Cary

22. “I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.”

— Joyce Cary

23. “The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.”

— Joyce Cary

24. “God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.”

— Joyce Cary

25. “Remember I’m an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.”

— Joyce Cary

26. “It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.”

— Joyce Cary

27. “Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.”

— Joyce Cary

28. “Old men when they begin to hear the last trumpet, on the morning breeze, often have a kind of absent-minded smile; like people listening. And their smiles are just politeness.”

— Joyce Cary

29. “No doubt any connoisseur, any collector, some bored old millionaire when he shows off his treasures, is seeking in your praise the resurrection and the life.”

— Joyce Cary

30. “So evil is the brood of the slogans that the most splendid and noble battle cries, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, bred nothing but new and more cunning, more hypocritical despots, better organised murder, popular nationalism drunk with the conceit of hooligans, militarism as the tool of demagogues, hatred not to be assuaged by the blood of millions and a century of tears.”

— Joyce Cary

31. “Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.”

— Joyce Cary

32. “A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I’ve no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.”

— Joyce Cary

33. “Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another.”

— Joyce Cary

34. “Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul – politics does the same thing for the body.”

— Joyce Cary

35. “Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.”

— Joyce Cary

36. “A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.”

— Joyce Cary

37. “A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.”

— Joyce Cary

38. “What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?”

— Joyce Cary

39. “An old mans memories, like his bones, grow sharp with age and show their true shapes.”

— Joyce Cary

40. “Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?”

— Joyce Cary

41. “Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.”

— Joyce Cary

42. “Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he’s against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.”

— Joyce Cary

Featured in: Strong Quotes

43. “When a woman gets the idea of justice, there’s no teaching her any sense.”

— Joyce Cary

44. “For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.”

— Joyce Cary