Quotes By Joseph Conrad
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
Joseph Conrad
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?
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
Joseph Conrad
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad