Joseph Conrad

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.”

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

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

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”

“Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.”

“Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism. ... Disestablishment, Land Reform, Universival Brotherhood are but like milestones on the road to ruin.”

“Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished.”

“When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”

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

“The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”

“She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.”

“One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become.”

“Running all over the sea trying to get behind the weather.”

“The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery.”

“Facing it — always facing it — that's the way to get through.”

“The future is of our own making — and (for me) the most striking characteristic of the century is just that development, that maturing of our consciousness which should open our eyes to that truth.”

“One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.”

“As to honour — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.”

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

“I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.”

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”

“The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites — and escapes.”

“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in life!!”

“Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.”

“In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.”

“The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath.”

“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.”

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

“I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way — but Bankok!”

“Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye! — Night — Goodbye!”

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

“The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.”

“A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.”

“Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.”

“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.”

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

“The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.”

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principal.”

“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art — which is art.”

“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.”

“The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.”

“To see! to see! — this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

“The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.”

“For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.”

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

“The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation.”

“To the destruction of what is.”

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. 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.”

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

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

“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—”

“Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.”

“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.”

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

“Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.”

“Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.”

“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.”

“Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?”

“I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't want to excuse myself; but I would like to explain—I would like somebody to understand—somebody—one person at least! You! Why not you?”

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