Joseph Conrad Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.

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

Joseph Conrad
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

Joseph Conrad
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.

Joseph Conrad
Gales have their personalities, and, after all, perhaps it is not strange; for, when all is said and done, they are adversaries whose wiles you must defeat, whose violence you must resist, and yet with whom you must live in the intimacies of nights and days.

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

Joseph Conrad
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

Joseph Conrad
It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

Joseph Conrad