Joyce Cary Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers.

Joyce Cary
Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. 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
I don't care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.

Joyce Cary
The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm.

Joyce Cary
Poets have started most of the revolutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

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

Joyce Cary
Teaching, in short, like everything else that conveys a meaning in words, is an art, and you can't be a good artist unless you believe you are giving a truth.

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