Joseph Conrad famous quotes

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

#Work #Reality #Men

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

#Book #Reading #Pockets

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

#Lying #Hate #Bears

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

#Funny #Hilarious #Women

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

#Inspirational #Men #Evil

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

#Peace #Men #Relaxation

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

#Struggle #Soul #Saws

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Weakness #Want #Brute Force

The mind of man is capable of anything.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Heart #Men #Mind

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

#Air #Atmosphere #Ink

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

#Song #Art #History

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

#Ambition #Feet #Literature

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

#Wisdom #Intelligence #Want

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 counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Thinking #Solitude

We live as we dream--alone....
-- Joseph Conrad

#Love #Dream #Dreamer

Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Strength #Weakness #Accidents

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

#Problem #Disappear #Inexplicable

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

#Art #Lines #Should

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Heart #Expression #Brain

... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Struggle #Choices #Loyal

We can never cease to be ourselves.
-- Joseph Conrad

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy
-- Joseph Conrad

#Grief #Apathy #May

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Art #Writing #Life Is Short

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Stupid #Perfect #Laughing

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Wise #Men #Fool

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Writing #Men #Fellow Man

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Ocean #Land #Miles

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Victory #Desire #Belief

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

#Strong #Pride #Reality

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

#Life #Eye #Dull

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Life #Dream #Fear

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

#Nature #Intelligent #Leader

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

#Blessed #Fog #Achievement

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

#Body #Faces #Caricatures

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

#Reality #Gossip #Claims

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

#Ironic #Dull #Safe

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

#Love #Dream #Fall

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.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Peace #Mean #Earth

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Yesterday #Long #Darkness

All a man can betray is his conscience.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Men #Betray #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.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Halloween #Moon #Night

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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Encouragement #Trying #Demand

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

#Art #Philosophy #Character

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

#Fate #People #Waiting

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

#Writing #Reality #Speech

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

#Power #Sea #Generosity

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

#Sea #Boat #Enticing

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Mistake #Age

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

#Writing #Trying #Tasks

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

#Courage #Cheer Up #Army

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Memories #Passion #Play

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

#Moving #Order #Literature

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Reality #Sight #Usual

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Travel #Sky #Water

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

#Teacher #Communication #Men

Like a flash of lightning between the clouds, we live in the flicker.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Life #Clouds #Lightning

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Ocean #Men #Sea

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

#Lying #Twilight #Ocean

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

#Heart #Sky #Clouds

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

#Simple #Ideas #Doors

Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Fool #Made #Folly

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. 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.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Ignorance #Destiny #Past

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

#Life #Regret #Knowledge

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Life #Success #Men

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

#Lying #Writing #Eye

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Art #Imagination #Invention

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

#Life #Art #Writing

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

#Life #Nature #Men

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

#Life #Dream #Essence

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

#Friendship #Men #Judging

One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Pulse #Fingers

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old
-- Joseph Conrad

#Cutting #Sea #Heaven

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

#Sea #Land #Choices

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

#Dream #Silly #Beer

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Moving #Games #Police

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

#Men #Views #Effort

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Wall #Men #Moon

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

#Darkness #Trifles

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Littles #Homesick

claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Land #Practice #Creating

5: Social security will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1944: The G.I. Bill will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1965: Medicare will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1994: Health care will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country!
-- Joseph Conrad

#Country #Citizens #Care

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

#Desire #Enough Time #Our Love

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Midst

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
-- Joseph Conrad

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.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Laughter #Moving #Pride

The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Way #Revolution #Creeds

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Terrorism #Baskets #Terrorist

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

#Long #Feelings #Scare

I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced
-- Joseph Conrad

#Voice #Evil #Speech

I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go
-- Joseph Conrad

#Mind #Legs

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Life #Lying #Existence

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

#Tombstone #Sleep #Sea

Here's the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Gossip #Topics #Different

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Accepted #Being Accepted #Understood

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Men #Race #History

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

#Cutting #Reflection #Achievement

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

#Life #Courage #Men

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when he is human, soon takes upon itself the face of pain.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Happiness #Pain #Joy

It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
-- Joseph Conrad

#Believe #Men #Luck

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

#Running #Memories #Risk