Joseph Conrad Quotes

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

- Joseph Conrad

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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?

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

Going home must be like going to render an account.

- Joseph Conrad

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

- Joseph Conrad

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.

- Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad