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Joseph Conrad Quotes
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Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe.

Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.

Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on, among other things, his native Poland's national experiences and his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.

✵ 3. December 1857 – 3. August 1924
Joseph Conrad photo
Joseph Conrad: 127   quotes 19   likes

Joseph Conrad Quotes

“The future is of our own making — and (for me) the most striking characteristic of the century is just that development, that maturing of our consciousness which should open our eyes to that truth.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to H. G. Wells (February 1902), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 2, p. 509

Truth , Future

“His name was Jermyn, and he dodged all day long about the galley drying his handkerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept. He was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling at the end of his nose, who either had been in trouble, or was in trouble, or expected to be in trouble — couldn't be happy unless something went wrong. He mistrusted my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways. I dare say he was right. It seems to me I knew very little then, and I know not much more now; but I cherish a hate for that Jermyn to this day.”

Joseph Conrad

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

Hate , Youth , Way , Sense

“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art — which is art.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 7

Love , Art , Nature

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

Joseph Conrad

Victory: An Island Tale http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6378/6378-h/6378-h.htm (1915), Part II, ch. 3

World

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

Joseph Conrad book Typhoon

Typhoon (1902), Ch. 2

Men , Change , Sea

“The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 28

Weather

“Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 8
Nostromo (1904)

Nature , Sense

“He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who ever stood up to him.”

Joseph Conrad book The Shadow Line

Referring to Mr. Burns. Compare to Heart of Darkness' manager: "He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that very well..."
The Shadow Line (1915)

God , Hate , Fear , Thinking

“A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 1
Often misquoted as "A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth."
Nostromo (1904)

Truth , Success

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. II, ch. 3
Under Western Eyes (1911)

Intelligence , Nature

“"God for men — religions for women," he muttered sometimes.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part First: The Silver of the Mine, Ch. 4
Nostromo (1904)

Women , Men , God , Religion

“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part First: The Silver of the Mine, Ch. 6
Nostromo (1904)

“An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 9

Personality

“One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become.”

Joseph Conrad book An Outpost of Progress

Tales of Unrest http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1202/1202-h/1202-h.htm. An Outpost of Progress (1902)

Food

“She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.”

Joseph Conrad book The Return

Tales of Unrest http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1202/1202-h/1202-h.htm. The Return (1902)

Beauty , Strong

“He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites — and escapes.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale, part III, Ch. 4

Life , Secret

“This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. In other river ports it is not so. They lie open to their stream, with quays like broad clearings, with streets like avenues cut through thick timber for the convenience of trade… But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides, where only one aspect of the world’s life can be seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

London Bridge to the Royal Albert Dock
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Life , Men , Lie , World

“For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.”

Joseph Conrad

Notes on Life and Letters (1921), Part II,, "Tradition"

Effort , Heart

“It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.”

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Chance (1913), part I, Ch. 6

Fate , People

“The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 2

People , Sense , Housing , Country

“Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter (September 1915), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 5, p. 509 ISBN 0521323894

Reality

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

Joseph Conrad

Notes on Life and Letters (1921), part II, "Well Done"

“Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow….
In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt….
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that… is always but a vain and fleeting appearance….
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Biography (1991) by Jeffrey Meyers, p. 166

World , Faith , Hope , Soul

“Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 2

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 9
Nostromo (1904)

Universe

“The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 10
Nostromo (1904)

Truth , Faith , Solitude

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

"The Censor of Plays" (1907)

Peace , Courage , Heart

“The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to Edward Garnett written in March 1899, published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 2, p. 177

Death , Soul

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

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

Men , War , Bird , Water

“History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 8

World , Art , History , Bird

“The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 36

Truth , Faith , Courage , Sea

“Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review (August 1901), as quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Life (2007) by Zdzisław Najder, translated by Halina Najder, p. 315

World

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

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale (1915), part II, Ch. 3

Life , Men , Age

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

Joseph Conrad

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

Men , Sea

“To the destruction of what is.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Toast by the Professor, Ch. 13
The Secret Agent (1907)

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 27

“When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

Joseph Conrad

An Outcast of the Islands http://www.gutenberg.org/files/638/638-h/638-h.htm (1896), first lines,

“The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part First: The Silver of the Mine, Ch. 6
Nostromo (1904)

World , Art

“I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam — a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because… their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

On Amsterdam, Ch. 14
The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

Children , People , Water , Appearance

“I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.”

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Chance (1913), part I, Ch. 6

Truth , Despair

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.”

Joseph Conrad

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

Love , Life , Death , Men

“Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

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

Men , Hope , Way , Soul

“The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale (1915), part I, Ch. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=jhVObcSHoQgC&q=%22The+world+of+finance+is+a+mysterious+world+in+which+incredible+as+the+fact+may+appear+evaporation+precedes+liquidation%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage

World , Appearance

“As to honour — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.”

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Chance (1913), Part I, Ch. 2

Women

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale, part II, Ch. 5

Love , Courage , Dependency

“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

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

Fashion

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

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

Country