Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Joseph Conrad (Polish-born British Novelist)

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

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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