“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”
Source: Selected Works of Joseph Conrad
“I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”
Source: The Heart of Darkness (Sparklesoup Classics)
“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.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Never test another man by your own weakness.”
“The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.”
Source: The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
“It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.”
Source: Heart of Darkness Thrift Study Edition
“I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“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 atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”
Source: Greatest Works of Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Duel, Lord Jim, Victory, The Shadow-Line, The Arrow of Gold, The Secret Agent, The Nigger of the Narcissus & Under Western Eyes: Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“We can never cease to be ourselves.”
Source: Joseph Conrad The Dover Reader
“He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”
“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”
Source: Nostromo
“Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”
Source: Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
“I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
“I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go”
Source: Heart of Darkness Thrift Study Edition
“I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.”
Source: Joseph Conrad Ultimate Collection: 18 Novels, 20+ Short Stories, Letters & Memoirs: Including Classics like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Duel, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Victory, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes
“I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.”
Source: Joseph Conrad Ultimate Collection: 18 Novels, 20+ Short Stories, Letters & Memoirs: Including Classics like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Duel, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Victory, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes
“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.”
Source: Lord Jim
“Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.”
“A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.”
“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.”
Source: Selected Works of Joseph Conrad
“A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.”
Source: Notes on Life and Letters
“That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.”
“It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.”
“Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad
“Here's the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”
“The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.”
Source: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
“Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.”
Source: Greatest Works of Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Duel, Lord Jim, Victory, The Shadow-Line, The Arrow of Gold, The Secret Agent, The Nigger of the Narcissus & Under Western Eyes: Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.”
Source: Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels [Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, etc.] (Book House)
“It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.”
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad
“Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.”
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)
“A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.”
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
“In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.”
“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.”
Source: Lord Jim
“Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.”
Source: A Set of Six
“Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.”
“Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”
“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.”
Source: Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad (Including His Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays: Unforgettable Tales like Heart of Darkness, Point of Honor, Falk, Secret Sharer, The Return & Freya of Seven Isles
“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.”
“It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.”
Source: Wisdom and Beauty from Conrad: Selected and Arranged by M. Harriet M. Capes
“You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.”
Source: The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad
