Joseph Conrad Quotes

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

We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.

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.

The world is to the young.

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!

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

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.

The sea never changes and its works, for all the talks of men, are wrapped in mystery.

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.

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.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

It's a long time since God has done anything for the people.

Agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions;

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,

God is for men, and religion for women.

The sea and the sky were welded together without a joint ...

I had immense plans,' he irresolutely muttered.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness

We were all in a tight group on the poop looking at her.

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.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

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

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.

There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.

The weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear;

A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare.

The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life ...

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.

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?

There are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.

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.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

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

Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind.

The world rests upon the poor . . . .

No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...

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.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

A fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.

The practical value of succes depends not a little on the way you look at it.

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

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

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

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

It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.

The earth seemed unearthly.

The double row of berths yawned black, like graves tenanted by uneasy corpses.

The men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty - all equal before sleep, death's brother.

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.

above - the Council in Europe, you know - mean him to be.' "He turned to

Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun ... In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' ...

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

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

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.

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

And after all, one does not die of it." "Die of what?" I asked swiftly. "Of being afraid.

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

Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest,

A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.

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

That man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot whenever there is something picturesque to be done.

There is death in the folds of her skirt and blood about her feet. She is for no man.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

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

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

Going home must be like going to render an account.

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

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

He was easily sorry for people.

There can be no life without faith and love - faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That

To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint.

I like what is in the work
the chance to find yourself.

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

The part of the inexplicable should be al lowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final.

Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.

To the destruction of what is.

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

Leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered

I must live until I die, mustn't I?

His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.

The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.

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.

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

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.

An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.

Art itself my be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.

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

He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.

There are things you find nothing about in books