Joseph Conrad Quotes

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

The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

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

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.

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

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.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness

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.

If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .

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

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.

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.

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.

In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. 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. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

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.

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

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.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

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.

I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.

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.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

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!

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

We live as we dream - alone.

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

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon.

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.

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

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.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

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

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.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire.

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

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

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

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

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.