Quotes to inspire and reflect

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

Omnia Romae cum pretio .

I want to give a picture [in Ulysses ] of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses? ” Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, “No, it did lots of other things too.”

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.

Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.

I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

[ Upon being asked whether he intended to become a Protestant :] I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. 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?

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

[ Of Dwight Eisenhower, whose death pushed Joplin off the cover of Newsweek:] Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week.

Get It While You Can.

Down on me, down on me

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

[ On Shakespeare’s portrait :]

[ On William Shakespeare :] Reader, look

Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex. . . . Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Fear of Flying.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is out to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

The Continental ship Providence, now lying at Boston, is bound on a short cruise, immediately; a few good men are wanted to make up her complement.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

The law is a jealous science.

[ To two women who commended him on his omission of vulgar words from his Dictionary of the English Language:] What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

[ On overindulgence in drink, to the extent of becoming a beast :] He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

[ When asked what he considered to be the real value of the Thrale Brewery, which, as executor, he was attempting to sell :] We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

[Quotation] is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

[ To a follower of George Berkeley’s philosophy, which held that things exist only insofar as they are perceived by a mind :] Pray, Sir, don’t leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist.

[ On the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland :] Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.

I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

Olivarii Goldsmith ,

No, Sir; to act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Why, sir, a man grows better humored as he grows older. He improves by experience. When young, he thinks himself of great consequence, and every thing of importance. As he advances in life, he learns to think himself of no consequence, and little things of little importance; and so he becomes more patient, and better pleased.

[ Replying to the question, “What, have you not read it through?” :] No, Sir, do you read books through?

[ Of Lady Diana Beauclerk :] The woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on ’t.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

[ Of Oliver Goldsmith’s apology in the London Chronicle for assaulting Thomas Evans :] He has, indeed, done it very well; but it is a foolish thing well done.

[ Of Lord Mansfield, born in Scotland but educated in England :] Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

[ Of a man who remarried after the death of his first wife, with whom he had been unhappy :] The triumph of hope over experience.

Johnson observed, that “he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney .”

Being told she was remarkable for her humility and condescension to inferiors, he observed, that those were very laudable qualities, but it might not be so easy to discover who the lady’s inferiors were.