Joseph Conrad Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

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

Joseph Conrad
All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a crime. You have no force.

Joseph Conrad
The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation.

Joseph Conrad
There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principal.

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

Joseph Conrad
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".

Joseph Conrad
"God for men — religions for women," he muttered sometimes.

Joseph Conrad
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

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
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.

Joseph Conrad
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

Joseph Conrad
But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.

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
To a teacher of language 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
There's nothing like a confession to make one look mad; and that of all confessions a written one is the most detrimental all round. Never confess! Never, never!

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
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