The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice.
All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.
I hope, or I could not live.
He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.
It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin.
There is no remorse like the remorse of Chess.
No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else’s document.
We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.
Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.
Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done.
It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.
Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.
The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.
Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.