Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

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.