Quotes to inspire and reflect

Honesty is praised and left to shiver.

It’s hard not to write satire.

O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

The only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

A portrait of the artist as a young man.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Dear, dirty Dublin.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week. In MY week.

Onstage I make love to twenty-five thousand people, then I go home alone.

Whatsoever he [Shakespeare] penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’.

Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging … Shakespeare wanted art.

Soul of the Age!

How far thou didst our Lyly outshine,

In small proportions we just beauty see,

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

This figure that thou here seest put,

Reader, look

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

You have a gift, sir, (thank your education),

Such sweet neglect more taketh me,

Suns, that set, may rise again;

Still to be neat, still to be drest,

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is.

Sex and taxes are in many ways the same. Tax does to cash what males do to genes. It dispenses assets among the population as a whole. Sex, not death, is the great leveller.

City of God, how broad and far.

Of music Dr Johnson used to say that it was the only sensual pleasure without vice.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.