Joseph Conrad Quotes

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon.

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

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.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness

A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

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.

The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

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.

Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.

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.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

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

The mind of man is capable of anything.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts.

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.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. 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.

We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.

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.