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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.

— James Joyce

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Life

More quotes by James Joyce

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)

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)

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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back.

Cary Grant Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Joyce (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.