Best Quotes by Joseph Conrad (Top 10)
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Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
Joseph Conrad
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It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad
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We live as we dream—alone....
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad
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Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
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You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. 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.
Joseph Conrad
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The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
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Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
Joseph Conrad
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It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
Joseph Conrad
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Joseph Conrad
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It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad
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The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.
Joseph Conrad
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The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad
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Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
Joseph Conrad
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We can never cease to be ourselves.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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
Joseph Conrad
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A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
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Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
Joseph Conrad
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All a man can betray is his conscience.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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?
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Joseph Conrad
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It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
Joseph Conrad
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Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
Joseph Conrad
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Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
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A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
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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!
Joseph Conrad
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A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.
Joseph Conrad
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As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
Joseph Conrad
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Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad
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To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
Joseph Conrad