Joseph Conrad Quotes (136 Quotes)

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

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

All a man can betray is his conscience.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

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.

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

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

The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

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

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists pricipally of dealing with men.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

The mind of man is capable of anythingbecause everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Even geniuses get the blues. The more I write the less substance I see in my work, ... It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move its eyes are baleful it is as still as death itself -- and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

Between the conception and the creation between the emotion and the response Falls the shadow

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Hang ideas They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.