We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean – except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.

— Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!” Part 4.

— Joseph Conrad

A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river.

— Joseph Conrad

And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success! For it may very well be that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side.

— Joseph Conrad

A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.

— Joseph Conrad

And this question was put with a note of personal pride that made me smile, as though he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle. He had regulated so many things in Patusan! Things that would have appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the stars.

— Joseph Conrad

But Jim did not know the almost inconceivable egotism of the man which made him, when resisted and foiled in his will, mad with the indignant and revengeful rage of a thwarted autocrat.

— Joseph Conrad

The serenity of truth and the peace of death can be only secured through a largeness of contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life. He.

— Joseph Conrad

One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid – to endure – to endure – even to the end – even beyond.

— Joseph Conrad

I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit – it is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience.

— Joseph Conrad

Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship.

— Joseph Conrad

There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get – well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality – in no other is the beginning all illusion – the disenchantment more swift – the subjugation more complete.

— Joseph Conrad

There can be no life without faith and love – faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That.

— Joseph Conrad

I certainly must,” said she. “This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house! – I must be in love;.

— Joseph Conrad

The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one’s experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon.

— Joseph Conrad

The tide of darkness flowed on swiftly; and with tropical suddenness a swarm of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend.

— Joseph Conrad

Our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright – an extra-terrestrial touch.

— Joseph Conrad

Anarchists, I suppose, have no families – not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.

— Joseph Conrad

Wilful murder?′ says he in his quiet way. ‘What the deuce is that? What are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes when they get in one’s way, but that’s self-defence – you understand?

— Joseph Conrad

A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.

— 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, and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims.

— Joseph Conrad
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