Gossip is what no one claims to like—but everyone enjoys.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Gossip
Going home must be like going to render an account.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Home
There is a weird power in a spoken word… . And a word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Words
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 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
The artist (in literature) appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Writing
What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Peace, Aspirations, Motivation, Optimism, Positive Attitudes, Relaxation, Serenity, Man
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: Revolutionaries, Revolutions, Revolution
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Crime
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: The Body, Jokes, Humor
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
Topics: Betrayal, One liners, Loyalty
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten—before the end is told—even if there happens to be any end to it.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Laziness
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: Secrets of Success, 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
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Water
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
A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Secrets
It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: People
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Courage, Bravery
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
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
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
As in political, so in literary action, a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Writing
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
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
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Nature, Dying, Death
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
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
—Joseph Conrad
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
—Joseph Conrad
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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