Joseph Conrad Quotes

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.

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.

Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

The interior deprives men of their senses. Here, the eerie stillness of the wilderness and the darkness of night render the men both deaf and blind. Without eyes or ears, they have no frame of reference-and without a frame of reference, they have no clear identities.

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

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.

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.

It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

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.

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.