Joseph conrad quotes

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.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

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

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

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

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.

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

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

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.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

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

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

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

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.

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .

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.

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

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

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

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

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

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

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

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

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

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

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.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

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

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

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.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

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

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

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

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

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

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

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

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

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out".

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

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.

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

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

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

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

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.

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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

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.

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

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

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

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

All a man can betray is his conscience.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.

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.

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.

[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

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

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

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

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

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

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

One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

God is for men, and religion for women.

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

We live as we dream - alone.

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.

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

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

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

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.

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

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.

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

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

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

One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.

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

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.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

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

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

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

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

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.

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.