Perhaps life is just that… a dream and a fear.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Living, Life
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Jokes, Humor, The Body
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Evil
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
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions
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.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: World
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Ambition
What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Aspirations, Serenity, Motivation, Optimism, Peace, Man, Positive Attitudes, Relaxation
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
There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Service
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
Topics: Language
No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what’s in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not others—what no other man can know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it means.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Work
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Despair
Felicity, felicity … is quaffed out of a golden cup … the flavour is with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
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 grieves… have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Emotions
As to honor, you know, it’s a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Honor
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
—Joseph Conrad
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.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Fear, Secrets of Success, Anxiety
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Death
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Revolutionaries, Revolution, Revolutions
No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Awareness, Self-Knowledge
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Words, Arguments, Persuasion
There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Friendship, Words
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
Topics: Artists, Arts, Personality, Art
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Government
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
—Joseph Conrad
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose—as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Exaggeration
Happiness, happiness… the flavor is with you—with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Happiness
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
Topics: Weather
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Water
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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- Ford Madox Ford English Novelist, Poet, Critic
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- Anthony Burgess English Novelist, Critic
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