Joseph Conrad Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

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

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.

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.

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

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

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

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.

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out".

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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