Joseph Conrad Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

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

Joseph Conrad
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.

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
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…

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites — and escapes.

Joseph Conrad
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known to history.

Joseph Conrad
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.

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

Joseph Conrad
The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

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

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

Joseph Conrad
The opening was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

Joseph Conrad
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

Joseph Conrad
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.

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad
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?

Joseph Conrad
Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

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

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks.

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

Joseph Conrad
Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

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

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

Joseph Conrad
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

Joseph Conrad