Joseph Conrad Quotes - Page 5

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

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.

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.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

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.

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

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future

The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

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

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.

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.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

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

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

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.

Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

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

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.

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

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