Joseph Conrad Quotes on Life (16 Quotes)

We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...

In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know.

He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort to death the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires and expires, too soon, too soon before life itself.

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.