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Joseph Conrad Quotes


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.

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.

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?

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.

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

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

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

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.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

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.

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.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

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.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

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.