Joyce Cary Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 58 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joyce Cary.
Famous Quotes By Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. — Joyce Cary
A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion. — Joyce Cary
Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich. — Joyce Cary
I look at life as a gift of God. Now that he wants it back I have no right to complain. — Joyce Cary
Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims. — Joyce Cary
The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real. — Joyce Cary
It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it ... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression. — Joyce Cary
The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm. — Joyce Cary
B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.'
'Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.'
'But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.'
'Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk. — Joyce Cary
What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination? — Joyce Cary
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul - politics does the same thing for the body. — Joyce Cary
No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year. — Joyce Cary
The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer. — Joyce Cary
Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother? — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
The only good government ... Is a bad one in a hell of a fright. — Joyce Cary
A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers. — Joyce Cary
I want the best of everything for everybody, and it will cost millions. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing. — Joyce Cary
Something you have to make ... It's all work, work. — Joyce Cary
Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders. — Joyce Cary
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat. — Joyce Cary
A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment. — Joyce Cary
No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it. — Joyce Cary
Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think. — Joyce Cary
Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another. — Joyce Cary
It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary
For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too. — Joyce Cary
A perfect God is the creation of a conceited man — Joyce Cary
No doubt any connoisseur, any collector, some bored old millionaire when he shows off his treasures, is seeking in your praise the resurrection and the life. — Joyce Cary
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. — Joyce Cary