Quotes by James Joyce
A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
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.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognize m...
—He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden ... you know ... There's a touch of the art...
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea and the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda g...
—Dead! says Alf. He's no more dead than you are. —Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not.
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 s...
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 mortality.
—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. —It does, Mr Bloom said....
Not the least vital of the problems which confront our country is the problem of her attitude towards those of her children who, having left h...
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.
And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation...
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was fallin...
Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.
An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.
By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it but my mind just wouldn't react.
