I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

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.

We live as we dream - alone.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.

The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks.