quotes from classic

Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can--and surely will at times--fail. I think we should follow a simple rule if we can take the worst, take the risk.

more quotes from James Joyce

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

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A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

more quotes from James Joyce

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.

more quotes from James Joyce

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

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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.

more quotes from James Joyce

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...

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And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation...

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The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.

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History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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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...

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—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. —It does, Mr Bloom said....

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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.

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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...

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Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not.

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—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.

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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...

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All that spirits desire, spirits attain.

more quotes from Khalil Gibran

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

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I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

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