Joseph Conrad Quotes

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

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

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

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.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.