Joyce Cary Quotes - Page 2

No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year.

Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.

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

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.

An old mans memories, like his bones, grow sharp with age and show their true shapes.

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

The principal fact of life is the free mind.

It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.