Quotes By Joseph Conrad

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.