Joseph Conrad Quotes

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

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.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

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

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

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

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.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself

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

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.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

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.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

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

All a man can betray is his conscience.

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.

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.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

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.

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.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

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

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.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

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

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

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.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

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

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

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

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

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.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

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