Quotes By Joseph Conrad

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Going home must be like going to render an account.

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.

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

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

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

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

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

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

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

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.