"To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom."
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Quote collection
James Joyce quotes (page 10 of 17)
323 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall."
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"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer."
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"A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory."
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"What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?"
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"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys."
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"One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature."
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"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei."
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"O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once."
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"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
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"I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them."
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"I'll tickle his catastrophe."
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"Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration."
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"The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric."
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"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."
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"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."
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"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight."
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