Joseph Conrad Quotes

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

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.

There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.

Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.

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

I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.

I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

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

The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

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

Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.

Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.

My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything.

He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

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

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.

I remember my youth... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.

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

The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empires.

There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art - which is art.

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.

The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.

For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.

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

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

It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.

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

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

All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.

One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?