Top 100 Conrad Joseph Quotes
#1. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Joseph Conrad
#2. Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.
Joseph Conrad
#3. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
Joseph Conrad
#4. The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.
Joseph Conrad
#5. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
Joseph Conrad
#6. All this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.
Joseph Conrad
#7. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
Joseph Conrad
#8. I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
#9. It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.
Joseph Conrad
#10. We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.
Joseph Conrad
#11. The serenity of truth and the peace of death can be only secured through a largeness of contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life. He
Joseph Conrad
#12. It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad
#13. The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.
Joseph Conrad
#14. The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.
Joseph Conrad
#15. The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad
#16. Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ...
Joseph Conrad
#17. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.
Joseph Conrad
#18. She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
Joseph Conrad
#19. Faithful death that never forgets in the press of work the most insignificant of its children.
Joseph Conrad
#20. We had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery.
Joseph Conrad
#21. Agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions;
Joseph Conrad
#22. The nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear - fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily to rage, hate, and violence.
Joseph Conrad
#23. If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man
Joseph Conrad
#24. The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
Joseph Conrad
#25. It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
Joseph Conrad
#26. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished - behold! - all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile - and the return to an eternal rest.
Joseph Conrad
#27. The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men.
Joseph Conrad
#28. I like what is in the work
the chance to find yourself.
Joseph Conrad
#29. This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it out for the edification of concealed murderers.
Joseph Conrad
#30. Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold
Joseph Conrad
#31. In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.
Joseph Conrad
#33. An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.
Joseph Conrad
#34. That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
Joseph Conrad
#35. Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence.
What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.
Joseph Conrad
#36. He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.
Joseph Conrad
#37. A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
Joseph Conrad
#38. Going home must be like going to render an account.
Joseph Conrad
#39. The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad
#40. Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not particularly fond of animals may give to his wife's beloved cat; and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially of the same quality.
Joseph Conrad
#41. You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything
and that's what so many of them youngsters don't understand.
Joseph Conrad
#42. Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank
but that's not the same thing.
Joseph Conrad
#43. A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.
Joseph Conrad
#44. Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have.
Joseph Conrad
#45. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence
but more generally takes the form of apathy
Joseph Conrad
#46. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Joseph Conrad
#47. This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain...
Joseph Conrad
#48. If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#50. The practical value of succes depends not a little on the way you look at it.
Joseph Conrad
#51. Like a flash of lightning between the clouds, we live in the flicker.
Joseph Conrad
#52. All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
#53. Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.
Joseph Conrad
#54. I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.
Joseph Conrad
#55. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad
#56. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body.
Joseph Conrad
#58. And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.
Joseph Conrad
#59. The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar
Joseph Conrad
#60. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.
Joseph Conrad
#61. Way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the center of a continent, I were about to set off for the
Joseph Conrad
#62. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it
I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
Joseph Conrad
#63. Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.
Joseph Conrad
#64. Does the price matter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to
Joseph Conrad
#65. The making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is a matter of temperament. His
Joseph Conrad
#66. Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:
"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"
This also became Conrad's epitaph.
Joseph Conrad
#67. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence?
Joseph Conrad
#68. A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind.
Joseph Conrad
#69. Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.
Joseph Conrad
#70. The calm was absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere.
Joseph Conrad
#71. For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.
Joseph Conrad
#72. This castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.
Joseph Conrad
#73. Was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the
Joseph Conrad
#74. You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times.
James Balog
#75. It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]
Joseph Conrad
#76. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.
Joseph Conrad
#77. 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
#78. My task is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. That
and no more, and it is everything.
Joseph Conrad
#79. Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.
John Le Carre
#80. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
Joseph Conrad
#81. A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.
Joseph Conrad
#82. There can be no life without faith and love - faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That
Joseph Conrad
#83. One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
Joseph Conrad
#84. It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Joseph Conrad
#85. The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand - which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.
Joseph Conrad
#86. They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
Joseph Conrad
#87. After reading Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad when I was a student at Yale, I wanted to live in the world they captured in their books. I had had some experience living in Africa. I was drawn to that kind of adventure.
Leslie Cockburn
#88. There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Joseph Conrad
#89. They will be bound to make some arrests, he thought, with something resembling virtuous indignation, for the even tenor of his revolutionary life was menaced by no fault of his.
Joseph Conrad
#90. There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.
Joseph Conrad
#91. The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction - that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.
Joseph Conrad
#92. On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest.
Joseph Conrad
#93. Leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered
Joseph Conrad
#94. One moment and bright the next. When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple
Joseph Conrad
#95. Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
Joseph Conrad
#96. The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.
Joseph Conrad
#97. In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco
the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity
had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
Joseph Conrad
#98. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
#99. 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.
Joseph Conrad
#100. One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
Joseph Conrad
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
