Joseph Conrad Quotes

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see.

4724

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

3276

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

2544

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

3986

I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

1938

Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

4891

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

2637

Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

2766

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

3464

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

1374

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

4119

In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.

4326

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

1920

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

3197

I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

3374

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.

4665

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

3798

For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

1962

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

4896

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

1048

Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

4339

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

3117

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

3386

He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.

2398

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

2567

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous-so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.

2183

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.

1899

It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]

2535

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.

3482

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

2858

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

4006