Joseph Conrad quotes - page 6

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer, renowned for his English-language novels exploring the complexities of human nature and the sea. His works, such as "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim," are celebrated for their psychological depth and vivid narrative style. He influenced modern literature with his innovative use of language and perspective. Here are 172 of his quotes:

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

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

Joseph Conrad

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

Joseph Conrad

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

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

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

Joseph Conrad

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

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Joseph Conrad

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

Joseph Conrad

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

Joseph Conrad

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

His name was Jermyn, and he dodged all day long about the galley drying his handkerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept. He was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling at the end of his nose, who either had been in trouble, or was in trouble, or expected to be in trouble - couldn't be happy unless something went wrong. He mistrusted my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways. I dare say he was right. It seems to me I knew very little then, and I know not much more now; but I cherish a hate for that Jermyn to this day.

Joseph Conrad

I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because... their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.

Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

Joseph Conrad

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

Joseph Conrad

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

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

Joseph Conrad

I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad

Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

Joseph Conrad

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

Joseph Conrad

His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.

Joseph Conrad

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Joseph Conrad