“Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.”
“In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.”
Source: Lord Jim and Nostromo: (A Modern Library E-Book)
“Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.”
Source: The Arrow of Gold
“There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property.”
Source: Victory
“Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.”
Source: Sea Stories
“Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.”
Source: The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad: 20 Novels & 26 Short Stories (Including Memoirs, Essays & Letters in One Single Edition): Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists: Heart of Darkness, The Duel, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes
“For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.”
Source: Lord Jim: Conrad's Collections
“And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.”
Source: Twixt Land and Sea
“The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.”
“There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.”
“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”
“Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and for war as well?...It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one's legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while.”
Source: Joseph Conrad’s Sea Tales - Premium Collection: An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, A Smile of Fortune, Typhoon and more: Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.”
“The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.”
Source: Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.”
“That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self
now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.”
“If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .”
“Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)
“There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Kisses are the remnants of paradise.”
“I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.”
Source: Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)
“The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation”
Source: The Napoleonic Novels: The Rover & Suspense: From the Renowned Author of The Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.”
Source: A Personal Record
“Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.”
Source: The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad: 20 Novels & 26 Short Stories (Including Memoirs, Essays & Letters in One Single Edition): Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists: Heart of Darkness, The Duel, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes
“I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.”
Source: Conrad's Prefaces to His Works
“I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)
“I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change.”
Source: Under Western Eyes (Unabridged Deluxe Edition): An Intriguing Tale of Espionage and Betrayal in Czarist Russia From the Renowned Author of Heart of Darkness, Nostromo & The Secret Agent (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.”
Source: A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences
“The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.”
Source: Lord Jim
“We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.”
Source: The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad
“Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.”
Source: The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
“I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality”
Source: The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
“Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.”
Source: The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad: 20 Novels & 26 Short Stories (Including Memoirs, Essays & Letters in One Single Edition): Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists: Heart of Darkness, The Duel, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes
“The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.”
“All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire.”
“The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.”
Source: Lord Jim
“A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”
Source: Joseph Conrad’s Sea Tales - Premium Collection: An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, A Smile of Fortune, Typhoon and more: Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“I remember my youth... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.”
Source: The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.”
Source: The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad
“The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”
Source: Heart of Darkness - Second Edition
“Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.”
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
“His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer
“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”
Source: Joseph Conrad The Dover Reader
“Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.”
“We live as we dream - alone.”
“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
