Joseph Conrad Quotes (127 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Joseph Conrad

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Famous Joseph Conrad Quotes

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

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Source: Chance (1913) part II, Ch. 5

“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 35
Context: 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.

“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book An Outcast of the Islands

Source: An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Pt. 3, Ch. 2; possibly an adaptation of a Polish proverb, "Ten się nie myli, kto nic nie robi" — "One is not wrong, who does nothing."

Joseph Conrad Quotes about men

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

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. II, ch. 4
Source: Under Western Eyes (1911)

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

“I saw him open his mouth wide… as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I
Under Western Eyes (1911)

“Nobody ever comes back from a "missing" ship to tell how hard was the death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what words on their lips they died. But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts from the extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar—from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 17

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Joseph Conrad Quotes about life

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book The Rover

Source: The Rover

“I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life…”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale, part IV, Ch. 14

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad: Trending quotes

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Typhoon

Typhoon (1902), Ch. 5

Way

“Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent

Madness

Joseph Conrad Quotes

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter (March 1890), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 1, p. 43 ISBN 0521242169

Soul , Forgiveness , Victory , Joy

“Only a seaman realises to what great extent an entire ship reflects the personality and ability of one individual, her Commanding Officer. To a landsman, this is not understandable—and sometimes it is even difficult for us to comprehend—but it is so! A ship at sea is a different world in herself, and in consideration of the protracted and distant operations of the fleet units, the Navy must place great power, responsibility and trust in the hands of those leaders chosen for command. In each ship there is one man who, in the hour of emergency or peril at sea, can turn to no other man. There is one who alone is ultimately responsible for the safe navigation, engineering performance, accurate gunfire and morale of the ship. He is the Commanding Officer. He is the ship. This is the most difficult and demanding assignment in the Navy. There is not an instant during his tour as Commanding Officer that he can escape the grasp of command responsibility. His privileges, in view of his obligations, are almost ludicrously small; nevertheless, this is the spur which has given the Navy its great leaders. It is a duty which richly deserves the highest, time-honoured title of the seafaring world—Captain.”

Joseph Conrad

Command at Sea: the Prestige, Privilege and Burden of Command

World , Understanding , Distant , Time

“We live as we dream--alone….”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Dreams

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”

Joseph Conrad

Source: The Secret Sharer and other stories

Thinking

“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.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Variant: My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.
Source: Lord Jim

Feeling

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Reality , Chance

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

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 3
Context: All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production — by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalist for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.

Life

“All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 13
Context: All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a crime. You have no force.

World , Passion

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I
Under Western Eyes (1911)
Context: 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.

World , Teachers , Appearance , Time

“Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Fear , Faith , Soul

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Soul , Madness

“The mind of man is capable of anything.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

For Men

“The horror! The horror!”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad

Question

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. IV, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

Life , Fear , Dreams

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Past , Future

“He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Hate

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

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I
Source: Under Western Eyes (1911)
Context: 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.

Reality

“Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”

Joseph Conrad

Variant: Gossip is what no one claims to like – but everybody enjoys.

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Source: Lord Jim

“We couldn't understand because we were too far… and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign… and no memories.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Age , Travel , Understanding , Memory

“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".”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Smile , Thinking

“We can never cease to be ourselves.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent

“Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

Joseph Conrad

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

Soul , Light

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

Joseph Conrad

“Never test another man by your own weakness.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Source: Lord Jim

“I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Dreams

“One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Wisdom , Truth , Time , Sincerity

“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 much.”

Joseph Conrad

Source: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

“I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Silence , Evil

“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Way , Water , Heart

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

Memory , Loneliness

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

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Source: Lord Jim

Art , Understanding , Knowledge

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Death , Hate , World , Forgetting

“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

World , Feeling , Time

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Truth , Fear , Rage , Time

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

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Autumn

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 26

Death , Faith , Madness

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

Joseph Conrad

Letter to Robert Cunninghame-Graham (January 1898), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 2, p. 30. ISBN 0521257484

Nature

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

Joseph Conrad

The Arrow of Gold http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/argld10h.htm (1919), Author's note,

Memory

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