Joseph Conrad Quotes (136 Quotes)

His eyes were naturally heavy he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.

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.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

A droll thing life isthat mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself and that comes too late.

I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the ap

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

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.

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

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

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

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

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.

I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind

Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

God is for men and religion is for women.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

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.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.

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.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it

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

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.