Joseph Conrad Quotes

We can never cease to be ourselves.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

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

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

My task is to make you hear, to make you feel,and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.

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

One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.

Life knows us not and we do not know life — -we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."