"Mistakes are the portals of discovery".
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“Shut your eyes and see.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“Life is too short to read a bad book.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“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 (1882-1941)
“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“Let my country die for me.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“There's no friends like the old friends.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
“There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Absence, the highest form of presence."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Fall if you will, but rise you must."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Children must be educated by love, not punishment."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"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 (1882-1941)
"Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"I am proud to be an emotionalist."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Thought is the thought of thought."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Places remember events."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it."
— James Joyce (1882-1941)