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.

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

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. 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

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

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.