Joseph Conrad Quotes

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.

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

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.

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.

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

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

Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

"And after all, one does not die of it." "Die of what?" I asked swiftly. "Of being afraid."

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished.