“The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empires.”
“In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”
Source: Heart of Darkness - Second Edition
“When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.”
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)
“The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
“The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
“A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.”
Source: Nostromo
“Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!”
Source: Lord Jim
“One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.”
Source: Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
“Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”
Source: Heart of darkness: an authoritative text, backgrounds and sources, ess ays in criticism
“We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.”
Source: Last Essays
“The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks.”
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
“Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion.”
Source: Under Western Eyes
“All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.”
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
“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.”
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 revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.”
Source: A Personal Record
“Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”
Source: The Complete Works of 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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)
“You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.”
Source: Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“God is for men, and religion for women.”
“I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.”
“As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.”
Source: Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels [Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, etc.] (Book House)
“All a man can betray is his conscience.”
Source: Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels [Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, etc.] (Book House)
“The interior deprives men of their senses. Here, the eerie stillness of the wilderness and the darkness of night render the men both deaf and blind. Without eyes or ears, they have no frame of reference-and without a frame of reference, they have no clear identities.”
“The artist 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.”
“Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.”
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
“The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men.”
Source: The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad
“The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.”
Source: The Secret Agent
“We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.”
Source: Selected Works of Joseph Conrad
“The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”
“The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death”
Source: Notes on Life and Letters
“The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.”
“Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.”
Source: Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.”
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 bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old”
Source: Joseph Conrad: Selected Novels
“The sea never changes and its works, for all the talks of men, are wrapped in mystery.”
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 kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.”
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
“Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.”
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)
“It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.”
Source: Lord Jim: Conrad's Collections
“The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.”
Source: Lord Jim
“Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)
“To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea
“The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.”
Source: Some Reminicscences
“Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.”
Source: The Mirror of the Sea
“A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.”
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 terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.”
