Joyce Cary Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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
No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

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

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

Joyce Cary
She had a mannish manner of mind and face, able to feel hot and think cold.

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

Joyce Cary
We have to have conceptual knowledge to organize our societies, to save our own lives, to lay down general ends for conduct, to engage in any activity at all, but that knowledge, like the walls we put up to keep out the weather, shuts out the real world and the sky. It is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

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

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