Quotes to inspire and reflect

By degrees

Trembling in her soft and chilly nest.

St Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.

So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.

There is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it. This imperative is Categorical … This imperative may be called that of Morality.

Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.

I paint my own reality.

Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

It’s often better to be in chains than to be free.

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

… Duas tantum res anxius optat,

Travel light and you can sing in the robber’s face.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Tenet insanabile multos

Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno.

Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.

Honesty is praised and left to shiver.

It’s hard not to write satire.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

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

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

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

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

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.

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.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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.

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.

Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

A portrait of the artist as a young man.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

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.

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

Dear, dirty Dublin.

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

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

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

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