Quotes By Joseph Conrad

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.

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.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

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.