72 Quotes by Joyce Cary

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

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

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

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

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joyce Cary
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share