Quotable Quotes: James Joyce
by Miki SaxonAfter wasting more than an hour looking for interesting Halloween quotes I decided there weren’t any that I didn’t use last year. James Joyce, on the other hand, said many interesting things and some of them are make useful guidelines for anyone working to get ahead.
“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Whether you consider yourself a genius or not, look for opportunities the next time you screw up instead of running for cover.
Joyce understood that everything we do in the present influences who we become, or, in his own words, “I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” He phrased it more simply a different time, “I am who I am because of who I was.”
If you just saw these words today you would probably attribute them to some current entrepreneur or corporate honcho, but they were uttered by Joyce more than 70 years ago, “I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need.”
Most of us think a bit of immortality would be pretty cool, but Joyce made sure he of his—and it worked. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Image credit: WikiMedia Commons