Joseph Conrad Quotes

Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

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

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

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.

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

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

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

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

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

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

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

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

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?

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

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.

Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

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

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.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

Here's the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.

When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death.

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

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

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.

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.

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

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.

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.

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

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

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

Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

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.

A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced

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