Joseph Conrad's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

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

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

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.

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

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.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.