A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
“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.”
Letter to Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Biography (1991) by Jeffrey Meyers, p. 166
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Joseph Conrad 127
Polish-British writer 1857–1924Related quotes
Source: Belonging: A Culture of Place
“Suffering without faith would be like love without hope.”
Source: Lumina and New Lumina (1969), p. 45
“He thought there was no hope for him. Me? I can't imagine a world without hope.”
Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (14 June 1946)
On the aftermath of her suicide attempt, p. 160.
Autobiography
“For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.”
Cited in: Opus majus: A translation by Robert Belle Burke. Vol 1 (1962). p. 128
Opus Majus, c. 1267
Context: For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics. For this is an assured fact in regard to celestial things, since two important sciences of mathematics treat of them, namely theoretical astrology and practical astrology. The first … gives us definite information as to the number of the heavens and of the stars, whose size can be comprehended by means of instruments, and the shapes of all and their magnitudes and distances from the earth, and the thicknesses and number, and greatness and smallness, … It likewise treats of the size and shape of the habitable earth … All this information is secured by means of instruments suitable for these purposes, and by tables and by canons.. For everything works through innate forces shown by lines, angles and figures.