Famous Joseph Conrad Quotations

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"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness"
by Joseph Conrad
"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory"
by Joseph Conrad
"I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace."
by Joseph Conrad
"It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth."
by Joseph Conrad
"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat."
by Joseph Conrad
"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of illusions."
by Joseph Conrad
"All a man can betray is his conscience."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men."
by Joseph Conrad
"But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others."
by Joseph Conrad
"Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
by Joseph Conrad
"For the great mass of mankind, the only saving grace needed is a steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart for the short moment of each human effort."
by Joseph Conrad
"Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows."
by 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 the spectral throat"
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow."
by Joseph Conrad
"It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck."
by Joseph Conrad
"Strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others."
by Joseph Conrad
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
by Joseph Conrad
"The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea."
by Joseph Conrad
"The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."
by Joseph Conrad
"The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds."
by Joseph Conrad
"There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind."
by Joseph Conrad
"They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything."
by Joseph Conrad
"We live as we dream - alone."
by Joseph Conrad
"We live, as we dream, alone"
by Joseph Conrad
"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it."
by Joseph Conrad
"Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!"
by Joseph Conrad
"Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life."
by Joseph Conrad
"Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality."
by Joseph Conrad
"You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends."
by Joseph Conrad
"I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one -- one for all men and for all occupations."
by 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?"
by Joseph Conrad
"Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters."
by Joseph Conrad
"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 atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all."
by Joseph Conrad
"Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles."
by Joseph Conrad
"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"
by Joseph Conrad
"It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull."
by Joseph Conrad
"You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?"
by 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."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad."
by Joseph Conrad
"They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience."
by 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."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."
by Joseph Conrad
"What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace."
by Joseph Conrad
"To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence."
by Joseph Conrad
"We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of the drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day ... The dawn were heralded by a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric planet ... But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roof, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droops of heavy and motionless foliage."
by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men are quite capable of every wickedness."
by 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."
by 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. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Joseph Conrad
"It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine."
by Joseph Conrad
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself."
by Joseph Conrad
"Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line."
by 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 ..."
by 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,..."
by Joseph Conrad
"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoo..."
by Joseph Conrad


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