"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."

"Nations have their ego, just like individuals."

"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

"Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms."

"He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses."

"The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question."

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."

"Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye."

"The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue..."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"Interpretations of interpretations interpreted."

"Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity."

"Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?"

"Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically."

"Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods."

"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

"It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep."

"To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher."

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

"She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male."

"You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?"

"The present is the now the here through which all future plunges to the past."

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

"He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible."

"He is cured by faith who is sick of fate."

"Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before me now, in fact... O, give it up old chap! Sleep it off!"

"Let my country die for me."

"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."

"She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband."

"And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."

"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

"The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. 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."

"I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space."

"I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact."

"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."

"God and religion before every thing!' Dante cried. 'God and religion before the world.' Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.'Very well then,' he shouted hoarsely, 'if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!''John! John!' cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. 'No God for Ireland!' he cried, 'We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!"

"If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love;Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough.Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and howIn the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now."

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."

"Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

"God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear."

"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk."

"By thinking of things you could understand them."

"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?"

"To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom."

"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."