Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.
I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.
What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?
There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.
If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.
Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.
One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description
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.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.
[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.
Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.
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?
What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?
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.
There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o'clock, and start writing at once.
We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
There is only one thing that makes any one athlete better than another, his heart. We all put our underwear on feet first, so we are all human.
No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.
An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.
Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.
What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?