“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?”
Source: Lord Jim (Unabridged Deluxe Edition): A Classic Novel of Guilt and Atonement From the Renowned Author of Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent & Under Western Eyes (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
“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.”
Source: Lord Jim
“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.”
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)
“Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”
“Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.”
Source: Typhoon and Other Tales
“Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.”
“Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”
Source: Under Western Eyes
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.”
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)
“I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.”
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)
“Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.”
“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”
“In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.”
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)
“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.”
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)
“It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.”
Source: Lord Jim
“All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.”
“A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.”
“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”
“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.”
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 sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea
“You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.”
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
“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?”
Source: Lord Jim
“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.”
“An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Lord Jim
“You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”
“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.”
Source: Lord Jim
“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 too much.”
“It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.”
“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea
“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.”
“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.”
Source: A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences
“Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.”
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
“Going home must be like going to render an account.”
Source: Lord Jim
“I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.”
“A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.”
“A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea
“Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”
“As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.”
Source: Chance
“Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.”
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)
“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”
Source: Under Western Eyes
“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”
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
“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”
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)
“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.”
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)
“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.”
Source: Lord Jim
“To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”
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 all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”
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)
“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.”
“A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.”
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
“The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
