Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.