40 Enthralling James Joyce Quotes

Absence is the highest form of presence.Letter to Lucia Joyce (May 29, 1935)

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 9, Page 182

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.A Suave Philosophy, in Daily Express, Dublin (February 6, 1903)

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 Clarence Mangan (1902)

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter V, Page 252

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.James Clarence Mangan (1902)

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.Letter to Augusta Gregory (November 22, 1902)

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.Ulysses (1922), Part I, Chapter 2, Page 28

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.James Clarence Mangan (1902)

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter I, Page 22

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.Ulysses (1922), Part III, Chapter 16, Page 612

All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.Finnegans Wake (1939), Part II, Chapter II, Page 301

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 call 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 defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter V, Page 291

What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 15, Page 518

Shut your eyes and see.Ulysses (1922), Part I, Chapter 3, Page 37

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.Exiles (1918), Second Act

God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter III, Page 141

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.Ulysses (1922), Part I, Chapter 2, Page 34

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.Notebook entry (Paris, March 28, 1903)

Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 8, Page 162

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.Letter to Stanislaus Joyce (December 7, 1906)

Phall if you but will, rise you must.Finnegans Wake (1939), Part I, Chapter I, Page 4

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter V, Page 299

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 13, Page 360

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 9, Page 204

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter IV, Page 200

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (November 24, 1926)

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter III, Page 129

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.To Jacques Mercanton, on the structure of Ulysses, as quoted in 'The Hours of James Joyce, Part I' by Jacques Mercanton (1962)

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 9, Page 178

Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.Dubliners (1914), Story 11. A Painful Case, Page 136

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another’s soul.Notes (1913) made by Joyce for his play Exiles

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter V, Page 239

First we feel. Then we fall.Finnegans Wake (1939), Part IV, Chapter I, Page 627

In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter III, Page 150

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.Dubliners (1914), Story 15. The Dead, Page 277

We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.Ulysses (1922), Part II, Chapter 14, Page 398

Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.Ulysses (1922), Part I, Chapter 3, Page 48

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.Letter to Augusta Gregory (November 22, 1902)