Quotes By Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

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

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.

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

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

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.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

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.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

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.

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

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.

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

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

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.