Joseph Conrad Quotes

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls i...

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

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectr...

Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?

He lived then before me, he lived as much as he had ever lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid app...

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible ...

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves or on whom she simply depen...

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their a...

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in li...

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beaut...

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain o...

He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. ...

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It...

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could la...

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in eve...

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all ...

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depen...

Felicity felicity ... is quaffed out of a golden cup ... the flavour is with you alone and you can...

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

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his ...

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tel...

this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres,...

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

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could las...

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of sc...

Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

How does one kill fear? ... How do you shoot a specter through the heart slash off its spectral hea...

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage,...

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls un...

The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage ...

The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convince...

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

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it but man will never on hi...

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle...

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, ...

This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive im...

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

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for the...

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts.... I su...

It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried ...

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is r...

The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, ...

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? D...

I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of i...

I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such ...

I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your ow...

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon ...

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We ...

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a cont...

And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secret...

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a ...

I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages ha...

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it,...

Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--o...

This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance...

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, wi...

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the takingit away from those who have a different comp...

The mind of man is capable of anything.

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apath...

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him ...

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s exis...

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

His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bott...

It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of...

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke...

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the street...

The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and o...

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the...

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the street...

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritatin...

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, t...

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never...

...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the mo...

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul th...

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while anothe...

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through ...

Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the f...

He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody...

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a drea...

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon...

It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most...

One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, "I am lying...

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest ...

[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced hi...

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but ...

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, ...

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. T...

The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the ...

We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--- those whom we obey, and those whom we l...