Joseph Conrad Quotes

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Joseph Conrad

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 3, 1857

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

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

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?

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad

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.

Joseph Conrad

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

Joseph Conrad

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Joseph Conrad