Joseph Conrad - Nostromo (1904)

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

Joseph Conrad
Of course government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.

Joseph Conrad
The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

Joseph Conrad
Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

Joseph Conrad
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

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
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

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

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

Joseph Conrad
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

Joseph Conrad