Top 281 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Conrad - Page 2

We live as we dream - alone.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.

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

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.

God is for men, and religion for women.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

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.

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.

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

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

Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

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.

A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.

It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.

All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.

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

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

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.

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.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.

Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.