Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
--James Joyce
Be just before you are generous.
--James Joyce
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
--James Joyce
Does nobody understand? (Last words).
--James Joyce
God made food; the devil the cooks.
--James Joyce
History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to wake
--James Joyce
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
--James Joyce
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.
--James Joyce
If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
--James Joyce
It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
--James Joyce
Life is too short to read a bad book.
--James Joyce
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
--James Joyce
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
--James Joyce
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.
--James Joyce
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.
--James Joyce
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
--James Joyce
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
--James Joyce
Shut your eyes and see.
--James Joyce
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
--James Joyce
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
--James Joyce
There's not too many people you see who are reading James Joyce's stuff, just for kicks.
--Harvey Pekar
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
--James Joyce
To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.
--James Joyce
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
--James Joyce
White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.
--James Joyce
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
--James Joyce
Found 26 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).