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.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness

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.

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.

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

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

All a man can betray is his conscience.

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

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!

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.

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

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

We live as we dream - alone.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

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

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

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.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.