Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by James Joyce (Irish Novelist)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish modernist writer whose “interior monologue,” a groundbreaking technique of narrative epiphany, influenced generations of writers.

Joyce’s collected works are few: two collections of poetry, a play, a book of short stories, and three novels. He is best known for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922, Paris; 1936, England.)

Joyce was born in Rathgar, now a suburb of Dublin. Even at a young age, Joyce was independent and scholarly. He learned Norwegian at the age of 19, intending to read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in their original language. While at University College in Dublin, he also studied Dante Alighieri, Aristotle, and many Elizabethan poets. He went to Paris for a year in 1902, determined to study medicine. He lived in poverty and wrote a book of short stories called Dubliners (1914.)

Joyce’s significant literary accomplishment is Ulysses, an extensive and remarkably original work charting a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin. The storyline follows the wanderings of Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus (the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in Dublin, and their eventual meeting. The various chapters parallel the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. Many early readers were awestruck by the highly allusive style; others were outraged by its sexual content and boldly scatological humor. The novel was banned in England and America for more than ten years. Today Ulysses is widely regarded as the most excellent example of literary modernism. It remains one of the most discussed novels ever written.

June 16, 1904, the day that encompasses the action of Ulysses, is the day that James Joyce met the love of his life, Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid from Galway. The couple lived in exile, raised two children, and were ultimately married in 1931. Every year, on June 16, in Dublin and other cities around the world, people gather to commemorate “Bloomsday” and relive the events in Ulysses.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Buddhism, Religion

While you have a thing it can be taken from you… but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
—James Joyce
Topics: Charity, Giving

In the particular lies the universal.
—James Joyce

He is incapable of a truly good action who finds not a pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
—James Joyce
Topics: Discovery

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.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius

Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet.
—James Joyce
Topics: Charity

I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
—James Joyce
Topics: Identity, Names

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.
—James Joyce
Topics: Love

Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
—James Joyce

Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.
—James Joyce
Topics: Beauty

An Irishman needs three things: silence, cunnning, and exile.
—James Joyce
Topics: Humor

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.
—James Joyce
Topics: Mothers

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
—James Joyce
Topics: Christianity

You cannot eat your cake and have it.
—James Joyce
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Topics: Intelligence, Genius, Courage, Discovery, Mistakes

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Topics: Mistakes

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
—James Joyce
Topics: Heaven, Violence

A man’s errors are his portal to discovery.
—James Joyce

History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
—James Joyce
Topics: History

The present is the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
—James Joyce
Topics: The Present

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.
—James Joyce
Topics: Arguments

When I heard the word “stream” uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn’t new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there’s Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
—James Joyce
Topics: Fiction

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
—James Joyce
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.
—James Joyce
Topics: Identity, Names

Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper.
Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
—James Joyce

I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need.
—James Joyce
Topics: Ambition, Confidence

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
—James Joyce
Topics: Religion, Churches

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?
—James Joyce

A nation is the same people living in the same place.
—James Joyce
Topics: Nation, Nations, Nationality, Nationalism

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