A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery.

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold.

The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle.

He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery.

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold.

The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle.

He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery.

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold.

The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle.

He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.

They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who had received their deathwound on battlefields far away over the sea.

That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold.

he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys’ fathers.

It is religion, Dante said. They are doing their duty in warning the people.

Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.

He was a public sinner.

There could be neither luck nor grace, Dante said, in a house where there is no respect for the pastors of the church.

We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.

Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift.

The day of your first communion was the happiest day of your life.

Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first holy communion.

It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home to his father that morning to send him a new pair.

He felt the touch of the prefect’s fingers as they had steadied his hand and at first he had thought he was going to shake hands with him because the fingers were soft and firm: but then in an instant he had heard the swish of the soutane sleeve and the crash.

The rector would side with the prefect of studies and think it was a schoolboy trick and then the prefect of studies would come in every day the same, only it would be worse because he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to the rector about him.

He was happy and free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan.

He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.

He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured.

The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.

The sudden flight from the comfort and reverie of Blackrock, the passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare cheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy

He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.

There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly.

The growth and knowledge of two years of boyhood stood between then and now, forbidding such an outlet

All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal

He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades

These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears

The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day’s unrest

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.

He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed.

His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.

I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.

He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him.

From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul.

His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.

The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state.

From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.

He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly.

The imagery of the psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride.

we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s holy will and to save our immortal souls.

What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul?

He who remembers the last things will act and think with them always before his eyes.

Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether from long disease or from some unexpected accident: the Son of God cometh at an hour when you little expect Him.

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path,

He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell for ever.

The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws.

They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light.

The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures.

But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury.

but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of divine vengeance.

As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh.

Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them.

In hell all laws are overturned—there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships.

The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts.

These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful.

Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins?

Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more!

Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the promptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which is gross and beastlike; and it is also a turning away from the counsel of our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God Himself.

God, remember, is a being infinitely good, and therefore the loss of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful.

How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God’s inexhaustible goodness.

if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child, for a man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend to be sundered from friend, O think what pain, what anguish it must be for the poor soul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving Creator

Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting.

They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their sins. For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages.

They will behold their sins in all their foulness and repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected.

You had time and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up religiously by your parents. You had the sacraments and grace and indulgences of the church to aid you.

In hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so are they more capable of suffering.

There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell.

Nay, things which are good in themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment:

But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.

Nor can nature escape from these intense and various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater.

Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain.

To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment.

At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun.

Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision;

A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer and a third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory.

Every word of sin is a wound in His tender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head.

No matter how many or how foul the sins if you only repent of them they will be forgiven you.

He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love.

It is impossible for any human being to do that which offends so deeply the divine Majesty, that which is punished by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and makes a mockery of Him.

He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and repentantly.

It was a terrible and a sad thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry.

It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul.

The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

Perhaps that first hasty confession wrung from him by the fear of hell had not been good? Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere sorrow for his sin?

the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the amendment of his life.

It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful to live in grace a life of peace and virtue and forbearance with others.

Once a priest always a priest, remember.

It is before you must weigh well, not after.

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant.

All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it.

He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.

His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed;

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine!

My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

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

These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up.

If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth

he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It 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.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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.

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it.

The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.

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.

Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible.

Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.

The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the scullery-maid of christendom.

He had left the classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow.

Reproduction is the beginning of death.

I’m a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I know I am. And I admit it that I am.

Only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the only difference I see.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight.

They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be.

I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

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?

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman’s hand.

Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to an end.

The church is not the stone building nor even the clergy and their dogmas. It is the whole mass of those born into it.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church

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 defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave.

Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

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