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Joseph Conrad Quotes


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.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

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.

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.

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.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

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.

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.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.