Joyce Cary Quotes

A perfect God is the creation of a conceited man

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.

A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

Something you have to make ... It's all work, work.

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.

The principal fact of life is the free mind.

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.

I want the best of everything for everybody, and it will cost millions.

I had come at last and my heart was beating again strongly to a heart that could not know despair because it forgot itself in the duty of its love.

Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.

The fear of hell, the punishment of sin, how the modern parent revolts from such teaching. Yet I will assert that far from doing us children harm, it was a sure foundation to the world of our confidence, a master girder in our palace of delight.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

I look at life as a gift of God. Now that he wants it back I have no right to complain.

The only good government ... Is a bad one in a hell of a fright.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

The Professor looked like a Protestant saint when the cannibal offered him the choice of taking six wives or being boiled alive. He wanted to mortify some flesh, but he didn't know which.

Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another.

It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.

Old men when they begin to hear the last trumpet, on the morning breeze, often have a kind of absent-minded smile; like people listening. And their smiles are just politeness.

The truth is that life is hard and dangerous; that he who seeks his own happiness does not find it; that he who is weak must suffer; that he who demands love will be disappointed; that he who is greedy will not be fed; that he who seeks peace will find strife; that truth is only for the brave; that joy is only for him who does not fear to be alone; that life is only for the one who is not afraid to die.

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.
Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

When a woman gets the idea of justice, there's no teaching her any sense.

I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.
And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age.

They can't give you all that, Mr Jimson,' said Walter, who was upset. 'It wouldn't be right. What would they give you seven years for?'
'Being Gulley Jimson,' I said, 'and getting away with it.

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.