Joseph Conrad (1857–1924,) born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was a Polish-born British novelist. Conrad drew upon his own experiences at sea to write many novels that explored the vulnerability and corruptibility of human nature. He was a central figure in the development of literary modernism.
Born in the Polish town of Berdychiv (then under Russian rule, but now situated in Ukraine,) Conrad was the son of revolutionaries who were sent into political exile. Orphaned at age 11, Conrad was driven by a desire to see the world and went to sea at age 15.
After 20 years at sea, Conrad settled in England, anglicized his name, and began writing fiction based on his significant experiences at sea. He became a British citizen in 1886. Even if he never spoke English fluently, he wrote in it.
Conrad’s notable works include Lord Jim (1900,) Heart of Darkness (1902,) Nostromo (1904,) and The Secret Agent (1907.) His books sold poorly, and his life as a novelist was a struggle of ill health and shaky finances. His career changed with the publication of Chance (1914) and Victory (1915,) two novels that brought him huge popular success and widespread recognition as one of England’s leading fiction writers.
Heart of Darkness gained a new audience through Francis Ford Coppola’s classic war film Apocalypse Now (1979.) Heart of Darkness is based on Conrad’s firsthand exposure to European colonial exploitation during an 1890 riverboat voyage up the Congo River.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Joseph Conrad
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Sincerity
You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Integrity
Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Management
For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Illusion
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: Anxiety, Secrets of Success, Fear
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
—Joseph Conrad
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
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Planning, Aspirations, Existence
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: The Past, Vanity, Memory
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
Topics: People
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. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Loneliness
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
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Luck
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
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Work
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
Topics: Life, Living
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
Topics: Unhappiness
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
I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one—one for all men and for all occupations.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Authors & Writing
As in political, so in literary action, a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Weather
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
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 true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: 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
Topics: Talent
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Ambition
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last forever, 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
Topics: Youth
Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Existence, Imagination
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: The Military, Navy, Army
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Ideas
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
—Joseph Conrad
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Love, Trust
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
I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one’s emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.
—Joseph Conrad
Going home must be like going to render an account.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Home
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Bravery, Courage
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, Personality, Arts, Art
No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Awareness, Self-Knowledge
Perhaps life is just that… a dream and a fear.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Living, Life
Criticism: that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Garden, Criticism, Critics
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