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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
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Joseph Conrad: 127   quotes 19   likes

Joseph Conrad Quotes

“A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I
Under Western Eyes (1911)

Love , Life , Men , Nature

“I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way — but Bankok!”

Joseph Conrad

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

Way , Sea

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principal.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 11
Nostromo (1904)

Peace , Justice , Law

“Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!… A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye!”

Joseph Conrad

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

Youth , Time , Night

“Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism. ... Disestablishment, Land Reform, Universival Brotherhood are but like milestones on the road to ruin.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter (19 December 1885), sent by Conrad from Calcutta to Joseph Spiridion in England, quoted in: [Najder, Zdzisław, Joseph Conrad: A Life, 106, https://books.google.com/books?id=F8ANmy_7mTMC&pg=PA106, 2007, Camden House, 978-1-57113-347-2]

“The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 8

Courage , Appearance , Evil