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....
In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and fleeting appearance....
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

Letter to Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991, ISBN 0-684-19230-6, p. 166.