Words matter. These are the best Joseph Conrad Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
Going home must be like going to render an account.
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 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.
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
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 caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.
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.
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.
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
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.
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.
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
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.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
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.
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.
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.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
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?
Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul and that’s resignation.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
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.
Perhaps life is just that… a dream and a fear.
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.