79 quotes
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Ulysses (1922)
One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
James Clarence Mangan (1902)
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
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.
Notes (1913)
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
Finnegans Wake (1939)
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
Finnegans Wake (1939)
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
Giacomo Joyce (1968)
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
Exiles (1915)
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
There's no-one as blind as the fellow that won't see.
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Dubliners (1914)
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
James Clarence Mangan (1902)
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.
Ulysses (1922)