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I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To give one's life for the cause is nothing. But to have one's illusions destroyed - that is really almost more than one can bear. -- Joseph Conrad
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men. -- Joseph Conrad
Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence.
What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. -- Joseph Conrad
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. -- Joseph Conrad
But this is the idlest of dreams: for I did understand perfectly well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent Capitaz, the Man of the People freed at last from the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco. -- Joseph Conrad
Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation. -- Joseph Conrad
Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place- whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. -- Joseph Conrad
I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had known
how to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war
in
all the exalted elements of romance. -- Joseph Conrad
This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it out for the edification of concealed murderers. -- Joseph Conrad
It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist] -- Joseph Conrad
I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone -- and to this day I don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience. -- Joseph Conrad
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions. -- Joseph Conrad
Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. -- Joseph Conrad
Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command. -- Joseph Conrad
Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an
intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues. -- Joseph Conrad
This is Nature - the balance of colossal forces ... the mighty Cosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this ... sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted ... why should he run about here and there, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?
from Lord Jim -- Joseph Conrad
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness. -- Joseph Conrad
Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of. -- Joseph Conrad
You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary - you see, absolutely necessary - to another person. -- Joseph Conrad
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones. -- Joseph Conrad
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market. -- Joseph Conrad
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull. -- Joseph Conrad
The field of influence was great and infinitely varied - once one had conquered a name. -- Joseph Conrad
He struggled with himself, too. I saw it
I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. -- Joseph Conrad
The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life. -- Joseph Conrad
Night, the inevitable reward of men's faithful labors on this earth ... -- Joseph Conrad
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration ... 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. -- Joseph Conrad
But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts. -- Joseph Conrad
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook. -- Joseph Conrad
It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do. -- Joseph Conrad
I saw him open his mouth wide ... as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. -- Joseph Conrad
He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall, and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars. It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows. -- Joseph Conrad
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. -- Joseph Conrad
The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face. -- Joseph Conrad
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. -- Joseph Conrad
The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. -- Joseph Conrad
Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't. -- Joseph Conrad
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. -- Joseph Conrad
The mind of man is capable of anything. -- Joseph Conrad
As i emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. -- Joseph Conrad
The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines. -- Joseph Conrad
Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old. -- Joseph Conrad
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe -- Joseph Conrad
It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. -- Joseph Conrad
No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work - no man does - but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. -- Joseph Conrad
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake. -- Joseph Conrad
and in time, when yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the -- Joseph Conrad
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat? -- Joseph Conrad
Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:
"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"
This also became Conrad's epitaph. -- Joseph Conrad
The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand - which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt. -- Joseph Conrad
There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. -- Joseph Conrad
All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality . -- Joseph Conrad
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream ... -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. -- Joseph Conrad
Ossip, I think you are a humbug ... you are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet ... -- Joseph Conrad
There was nothing but myself between him and the dark ocean. I had a sense of responsibility. If I spoke, would -- Joseph Conrad
I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works. -- Joseph Conrad
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took council with this great solitude - and the whisper has proved irresistibly fascinating. -- Joseph Conrad
We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness -- Joseph Conrad
This castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. -- Joseph Conrad
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others. -- Joseph Conrad
His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next. -- Joseph Conrad
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose. -- Joseph Conrad
And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble. -- Joseph Conrad
This month past. They had been engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time - had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a -- Joseph Conrad
But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to a few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solititude and want of faith in himself and others. -- Joseph Conrad
Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold -- Joseph Conrad
For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. -- Joseph Conrad
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history. -- Joseph Conrad
If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man -- Joseph Conrad
The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. -- Joseph Conrad
But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond these words. -- Joseph Conrad
We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully. -- Joseph Conrad
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck. -- Joseph Conrad
We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen. -- Joseph Conrad
You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything
and that's what so many of them youngsters don't understand. -- Joseph Conrad
The terrosirt and the policeman both come form the same basket. Revolution, legality - countermoves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. -- Joseph Conrad
The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar -- Joseph Conrad
He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? -- Joseph Conrad
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance. -- Joseph Conrad
His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. -- Joseph Conrad
Chief of the Inner Station,' he answered in a short tone, looking away. 'Much obliged,' I said, laughing. 'And you are the brickmaker of the Central Station. Everyone knows that.' He was silent for a while. -- Joseph Conrad
There can be no life without faith and love - faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That -- Joseph Conrad
Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings. -- Joseph Conrad
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. -- Joseph Conrad
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. -- Joseph Conrad
The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink. -- Joseph Conrad
The earth seemed unearthly. -- Joseph Conrad
From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
Was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the -- Joseph Conrad
He applied himself to that pastime with great industry, -- Joseph Conrad
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. -- Joseph Conrad
Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
Don't be too sure,' he continued. The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps. -- Joseph Conrad
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs. -- Joseph Conrad
Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. That's what it is! They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people - nothing else. -- Joseph Conrad
Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, -- Joseph Conrad
But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind. -- Joseph Conrad
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. -- Joseph Conrad
Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, though made in God's image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings. -- Joseph Conrad
On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest. -- Joseph Conrad
...in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that
surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds
that fill our ears, and in the air that fill our lungs. -- Joseph Conrad
And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all? -- Joseph Conrad
Does the price matter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to -- Joseph Conrad
Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded -- Joseph Conrad
Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly. -- Joseph Conrad
The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears. -- Joseph Conrad
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so. -- Joseph Conrad
this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on -- Joseph Conrad
doomed to be the recipient of confidences... -- Joseph Conrad
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. -- Joseph Conrad
Outside, the clear-cut strokes of the town clock counting -- Joseph Conrad
For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself! -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience. -- Joseph Conrad
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. -- Joseph Conrad
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian. -- Joseph Conrad
The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation -- Joseph Conrad
French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast -- Joseph Conrad
But in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. -- Joseph Conrad
Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker. -- Joseph Conrad
In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco
the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity
had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. -- Joseph Conrad
Agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; -- Joseph Conrad
Nobody, nobody is good enough -- Joseph Conrad
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.
-- Joseph Conrad
The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of a over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances -- Joseph Conrad
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land. -- Joseph Conrad
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. -- Joseph Conrad
There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves. -- Joseph Conrad
They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. -- Joseph Conrad
I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral. -- Joseph Conrad
The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The world rests upon the poor . . . . -- Joseph Conrad
You read the Company's confidential correspondence?' I asked. He hadn't a word to say. It was great fun. 'When Mr. Kurtz,' I continued severely, 'is General Manager, you won't have the opportunity.' He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went outside. The moon had risen. Black -- Joseph Conrad
Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury -- Joseph Conrad
I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness. -- Joseph Conrad
[T]he tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting; of the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and, perhaps, beyond. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. -- Joseph Conrad
Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not particularly fond of animals may give to his wife's beloved cat; and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially of the same quality. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. -- Joseph Conrad
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town. -- Joseph Conrad
A stone image shed a miraculous tear of compassion over the incertitudes of life and death ... -- Joseph Conrad
He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. -- Joseph Conrad
For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. -- Joseph Conrad
It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares. -- Joseph Conrad
Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion. -- Joseph Conrad
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the August light of abiding memories. -- Joseph Conrad
The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction - that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything! -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation. -- Joseph Conrad
Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. -- Joseph Conrad
Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious. -- Joseph Conrad
A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows. -- Joseph Conrad
Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service. -- Joseph Conrad
His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie. -- Joseph Conrad
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully. -- Joseph Conrad
I don't know the world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too solitary - I am too young to trust my own opinions. -- Joseph Conrad
Stein lifted his hand. "And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?" He shook his head regretfully. "It seems to me that some would have been very fine - if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don't know. -- Joseph Conrad
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth. -- Joseph Conrad
They will be bound to make some arrests, he thought, with something resembling virtuous indignation, for the even tenor of his revolutionary life was menaced by no fault of his. -- Joseph Conrad
I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces. -- Joseph Conrad
This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain... -- Joseph Conrad
I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change. -- Joseph Conrad
The sea and the sky were welded together without a joint ... -- Joseph Conrad
A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind. -- Joseph Conrad
Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but hang me if I don't believe that some women could live by love alone. -- Joseph Conrad
The double row of berths yawned black, like graves tenanted by uneasy corpses. -- Joseph Conrad
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it. -- Joseph Conrad
Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant Commissioner smiled faintly. -- Joseph Conrad
She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water. -- Joseph Conrad
And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank -- Joseph Conrad
A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint. -- Joseph Conrad
Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion. -- Joseph Conrad
Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence. -- Joseph Conrad
From the ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow -- Joseph Conrad
The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. -- Joseph Conrad
And after all, one does not die of it." "Die of what?" I asked swiftly. "Of being afraid. -- Joseph Conrad
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. -- Joseph Conrad
...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. -- Joseph Conrad
Outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied -- Joseph Conrad
[The wilderness] had caressed him, and - lo! - he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. -- Joseph Conrad
Slavery is an awful thing," stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice. "Frightful - the sufferings," grunted Carlier with conviction. -- Joseph Conrad
I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time - -- Joseph Conrad
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement. -- Joseph Conrad
I believe in children praying
well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. -- Joseph Conrad
One moment and bright the next. When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple -- Joseph Conrad
He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. -- Joseph Conrad
He was easily sorry for people. -- Joseph Conrad
Mistah Kurtz--he dead. -- Joseph Conrad
Art itself my be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe. -- Joseph Conrad
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates. -- Joseph Conrad
Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others, -- Joseph Conrad
You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability, -- Joseph Conrad
Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time. -- Joseph Conrad
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations. -- Joseph Conrad
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
Way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the center of a continent, I were about to set off for the -- Joseph Conrad
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
Like a flash of lightning between the clouds, we live in the flicker. -- Joseph Conrad
A duel, whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of honour, or even when reduced in its moral essence to a form of manly sport, demands a perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. [The duel] -- Joseph Conrad
When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages
hate them to the death. -- Joseph Conrad
The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation. -- Joseph Conrad
The men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty - all equal before sleep, death's brother. -- Joseph Conrad
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
I have been very happy - very fortunate - very proud,' she went on. 'Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for - for life. -- Joseph Conrad
The serenity of truth and the peace of death can be only secured through a largeness of contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life. He -- Joseph Conrad
For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living. -- Joseph Conrad
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon -- Joseph Conrad
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love. -- Joseph Conrad
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs. -- Joseph Conrad
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. -- Joseph Conrad
It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. -- Joseph Conrad
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind. -- Joseph Conrad
Leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered -- Joseph Conrad
The calm was absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere. -- Joseph Conrad
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank
but that's not the same thing. -- Joseph Conrad
Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man. -- Joseph Conrad
bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What -- Joseph Conrad
And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. -- Joseph Conrad
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion. -- Joseph Conrad
We couldn't understand because we were too far ... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign ... and no memories. -- Joseph Conrad
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak - the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. -- Joseph Conrad
There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. -- Joseph Conrad
My task is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. That
and no more, and it is everything. -- Joseph Conrad
We had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. -- Joseph Conrad
Let the earth and the sea each have its own. -- Joseph Conrad
He had found the secret of keeping for ever on the run the fundamental imbecility of mankind; he had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made himself master of every moment of our existence. -- Joseph Conrad
Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild - and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. -- Joseph Conrad
She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension. -- Joseph Conrad
Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass? -- Joseph Conrad
Man. I nearly burst into a laugh. 'Do you read the Company's confidential correspondence?' I asked. He hadn't a word to say. It was great fun. 'When Mr. Kurtz,' I continued -- Joseph Conrad
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. -- Joseph Conrad
And Heyst, the son, read:
Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love - the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams. -- Joseph Conrad
She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life," said Heyst. "It's a very respectable task. -- Joseph Conrad
His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain
why he did not instantly disappear. -- Joseph Conrad
It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. -- Joseph Conrad
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. -- Joseph Conrad
The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the unpleasant realities of the present hour. An unpleasant voice too. He had heard it for many years, and with every year he liked it less. No matter; there would be an end to all this soon. -- Joseph Conrad
It is before you - smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the -- Joseph Conrad
Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out". -- Joseph Conrad
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. -- Joseph Conrad
Old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled -- Joseph Conrad
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? -- Joseph Conrad
Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness. -- Joseph Conrad
To the destruction of what is. -- Joseph Conrad
Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall. -- Joseph Conrad
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. -- Joseph Conrad
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. -- Joseph Conrad
Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. -- Joseph Conrad
river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, -- Joseph Conrad
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale. -- Joseph Conrad
Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism. -- Joseph Conrad
The horror! The horror! -- Joseph Conrad
There were
things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he
had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot
he forgot. The light
had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant
shadows. -- Joseph Conrad
The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. -- Joseph Conrad
I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life, - a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage ... -- Joseph Conrad
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight. -- Joseph Conrad
No method at all,' I murmured after a while. 'Exactly, -- Joseph Conrad
There are more kinds of fools than one can guard against. -- Joseph Conrad
It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more substantial than vapor floating in the sky, every emotion of a woman is bound to end in a shower. -- Joseph Conrad
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence
that which makes its truth, its meaning
its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream
alone. -- Joseph Conrad
You see we had on the whole liked him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest one takes in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise. -- Joseph Conrad
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put it's trust in life! -- Joseph Conrad
Skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures -- Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad once said that a man who is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea -- Joseph Conrad
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing. -- Joseph Conrad
It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance. -- Joseph Conrad
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape. -- Joseph Conrad
There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope. -- Joseph Conrad
Smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not -- Joseph Conrad
That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer. -- Joseph Conrad
We live in the flicker
may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. -- Joseph Conrad
Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. -- Joseph Conrad
It was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, "I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit," that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences. -- Joseph Conrad
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies ... -- Joseph Conrad
Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men. -- Joseph Conrad
above - the Council in Europe, you know - mean him to be.' "He turned to -- Joseph Conrad
The nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear - fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily to rage, hate, and violence. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live. -- Joseph Conrad
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ... -- Joseph Conrad
As is often the case with lawless natures, Ricardo's faith in any given individual was of a simple, unquestioning character. For man must have some support in life. -- Joseph Conrad
Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? -- Joseph Conrad
All a man can betray is his conscience. -- Joseph Conrad
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. -- Joseph Conrad
Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind - completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul. -- Joseph Conrad
He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. -- Joseph Conrad
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it. -- Joseph Conrad
I don't like work
no man does
but I like what is in the work
the chance to find yourself. Your own reality
for yourself not for others
what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. -- Joseph Conrad
She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast. -- Joseph Conrad
Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his arms - two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine - the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. -- Joseph Conrad
Everything is inconceivable. The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions. -- Joseph Conrad
To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint. -- Joseph Conrad
I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly. -- Joseph Conrad
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense ... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world. -- Joseph Conrad
Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it. -- Joseph Conrad
The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds. -- Joseph Conrad
There are things you find nothing about in books -- Joseph Conrad
And after some talk we agreed that the wisdom of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no greater than that of men. -- Joseph Conrad
On his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and -- Joseph Conrad
We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, -- Joseph Conrad
Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her - first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next, as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. -- Joseph Conrad
The sea never changes and its works, for all the talks of men, are wrapped in mystery. -- Joseph Conrad
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad. -- Joseph Conrad
[Perverse] unreason has its own logical processes -- Joseph Conrad
There's no worse enemy and no better friend than a brother, Tuan, for one brother knows another, and in perfect knowledge is strength for good or evil. -- Joseph Conrad
All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie. -- Joseph Conrad
But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished - behold! - all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile - and the return to an eternal rest. -- Joseph Conrad
The priests talk of consecrated ground! Bah! All the earth made by God is holy; but the sea, which knows nothing of kings and priests and tyrants, is the holiest of all. -- Joseph Conrad
And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad councillor. It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster. -- Joseph Conrad
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind! -- Joseph Conrad
Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is
that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. -- Joseph Conrad
I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship. -- Joseph Conrad
undemonstrative in a burly fat-pig style -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
It was a dark story. -- Joseph Conrad
Going home must be like going to render an account. -- Joseph Conrad
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad. -- Joseph Conrad
No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us... -- Joseph Conrad
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. -- Joseph Conrad
The part of the inexplicable should be al lowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final. -- Joseph Conrad
I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. [An anarchist] -- Joseph Conrad
His hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. -- Joseph Conrad
Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns
and even convictions. -- Joseph Conrad
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all. -- Joseph Conrad
A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. -- Joseph Conrad
Droll thing life is
that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself
that comes too late
a crop of inextinguishable regrets. -- Joseph Conrad
The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul. -- Joseph Conrad
The interior deprives men of their senses. Here, the eerie stillness of the wilderness and the darkness of night render the men both deaf and blind. Without eyes or ears, they have no frame of reference-and without a frame of reference, they have no clear identities. -- Joseph Conrad
And there's another thing: a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience and all that sort of thing. Why--what else would you have to fight against. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. -- Joseph Conrad
He feels it himself, and says often that he is 'preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave ... ' while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies. -- Joseph Conrad
The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics ... -- Joseph Conrad
The man who can't do most things and won't do the rest -- Joseph Conrad
Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys. -- Joseph Conrad
I like what is in the work
the chance to find yourself. -- Joseph Conrad
Never test another man by your own weakness. -- Joseph Conrad
Any work aspiring to be art however humble should carry its justification in every line. -- Joseph Conrad
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms. -- Joseph Conrad
I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common, short, and empty; that it is in seeking the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated! -- Joseph Conrad
There is death in the folds of her skirt and blood about her feet. She is for no man. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! ( ... ) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her ... Pass the bottle. -- Joseph Conrad
The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil. -- Joseph Conrad
Rich or poor, strong or weak, who among us has not begged God for a second chance? -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
The gift of heaven is in the hands of every man. But -- Joseph Conrad
The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope. -- Joseph Conrad
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth. -- Joseph Conrad
He was absurd to the point of inspiration. -- Joseph Conrad
A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare. -- Joseph Conrad
The value of a sentence is the personality that utters't, for nothing new can be said by any man or woman. -- Joseph Conrad
You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. -- Joseph Conrad
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. -- Joseph Conrad
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. -- Joseph Conrad
One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader. -- Joseph Conrad
I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. -- Joseph Conrad
I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced -- Joseph Conrad
Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done. -- Joseph Conrad
I had immense plans,' he irresolutely muttered. -- Joseph Conrad
Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence
but more generally takes the form of apathy -- Joseph Conrad
The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life. -- Joseph Conrad
And a word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space. -- Joseph Conrad
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men. -- Joseph Conrad
The fascination of the abomination. -- Joseph Conrad
If it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography - and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation - then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. -- Joseph Conrad
Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun ... In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' ... -- Joseph Conrad
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted. -- Joseph Conrad
At him I seemed to see again the other one - the father, cast out -- Joseph Conrad
A fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. -- Joseph Conrad
I remember my youth ... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men. -- Joseph Conrad
The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it. -- Joseph Conrad
Kisses are the remnants of paradise. -- Joseph Conrad
The making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is a matter of temperament. His -- Joseph Conrad
His picturesque and filthy loquacity flowed like a troubled stream from a poisoned source. -- Joseph Conrad
He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life. -- Joseph Conrad
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! -- Joseph Conrad
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine. -- Joseph Conrad
To slay, to love - the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either. -- Joseph Conrad
Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have. -- Joseph Conrad
That man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot whenever there is something picturesque to be done. -- Joseph Conrad
Everything belonged to him
but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. -- Joseph Conrad
One lives too long. Happy X-mas. -- Joseph Conrad
All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. -- Joseph Conrad
The weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; -- Joseph Conrad
Felicity, felicity - how shall I say it? - is quaffed out of a golden cup in every latitude: the flavour is with you - with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please. -- Joseph Conrad
We live as we dream--alone.... -- Joseph Conrad
A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence. -- Joseph Conrad
I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair. -- Joseph Conrad
Oh youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! -- Joseph Conrad
Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men. -- Joseph Conrad
And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth. -- Joseph Conrad
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. -- Joseph Conrad
All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire. -- Joseph Conrad
I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. -- Joseph Conrad
Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest. -- Joseph Conrad
And in this case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own. -- Joseph Conrad
There is a weird power in a spoken word. -- Joseph Conrad
It blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. 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 -- Joseph Conrad
Horror!' "'His last word - to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him - I loved him - I loved him!' "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "'The last word he pronounced -- Joseph Conrad
The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. -- Joseph Conrad
The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature. -- Joseph Conrad
In life, you see, there is not much choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us, painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot. -- Joseph Conrad
It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. -- Joseph Conrad
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends. -- Joseph Conrad
Conceive you - that ass! -- Joseph Conrad
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life. -- Joseph Conrad
We were all in a tight group on the poop looking at her. -- Joseph Conrad
A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway. -- Joseph Conrad
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. -- Joseph Conrad
He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. -- Joseph Conrad
A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance. -- Joseph Conrad
I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go -- Joseph Conrad
Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions. -- Joseph Conrad
Faithful death that never forgets in the press of work the most insignificant of its children. -- Joseph Conrad
Fatalism is born of the fear of failure, for we all believe that we carry success in our own hands, and we suspect that our hands are weak. -- Joseph Conrad
Of a decent young citizen in a toga - perhaps too much dice, you know - coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, -- Joseph Conrad
Light came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes, but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! -- Joseph Conrad
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters. -- Joseph Conrad
He must meet that truth with his own true stuff - with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags - rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. -- Joseph Conrad
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death -- Joseph Conrad
All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. -- Joseph Conrad
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence ... -- Joseph Conrad
A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. -- Joseph Conrad
All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity - it is to destroy it. -- Joseph Conrad
The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. -- Joseph Conrad
(law is) the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry ? -- Joseph Conrad
Fine fellows - cannibals - in their place. -- Joseph Conrad
I must live until I die, mustn't I? -- Joseph Conrad
Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. -- Joseph Conrad
The sight of it made the earth seem unearthly. They were accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there
there you could look at a thing monstrous, beautiful, and free. -- Joseph Conrad
The practical value of succes depends not a little on the way you look at it. -- Joseph Conrad
The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one. -- Joseph Conrad
A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee. -- Joseph Conrad
Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind. -- Joseph Conrad
We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were - No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion -- Joseph Conrad
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear -- Joseph Conrad
The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves -- Joseph Conrad
Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. -- Joseph Conrad
Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. -- Joseph Conrad
I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one. -- Joseph Conrad
My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything. -- Joseph Conrad
Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes. -- Joseph Conrad
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility -- Joseph Conrad
We can never cease to be ourselves. -- Joseph Conrad
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. -- Joseph Conrad
It's a long time since God has done anything for the people. -- Joseph Conrad
If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything . -- Joseph Conrad
It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose. -- Joseph Conrad
All this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream. -- Joseph Conrad
No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. -- Joseph Conrad
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life ... -- Joseph Conrad
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. -- Joseph Conrad
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 much. -- Joseph Conrad
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin. -- Joseph Conrad
God is for men, and religion for women. -- Joseph Conrad
True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. -- Joseph Conrad
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. -- Joseph Conrad
It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. -- Joseph Conrad
An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers. -- Joseph Conrad
The world is to the young. -- Joseph Conrad
The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. -- Joseph Conrad
I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me. -- Joseph Conrad
He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust - just uneasiness - nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a ... a ... faculty can be. -- Joseph Conrad
In the destructive element immerse. -- Joseph Conrad
There must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have used them for self-communion. Being -- Joseph Conrad
The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the
privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful
continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection. -- Joseph Conrad
I only know that he who makes a tie is lost, the seed of corruption has entered his heart -- Joseph Conrad
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick. -- Joseph Conrad
brooding over the upper reaches, became -- Joseph Conrad
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. -- Joseph Conrad
I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality -- Joseph Conrad
I said; 'his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.' 'But I do not. I cannot - I -- Joseph Conrad
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace. -- Joseph Conrad
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. -- Joseph Conrad
Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children! -- Joseph Conrad
