Quotes By Joseph Conrad

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.

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

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

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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

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.

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

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

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

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

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

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

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

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

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.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

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.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.