Joseph Conrad Quotes

It was a dark story.

~ Joseph Conrad

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.

~ Joseph Conrad

He lived then before me, he lived as much as he had ever lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me---the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum regular and muffled like the beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness.

~ Joseph Conrad

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

~ Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything.

~ Joseph Conrad

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?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

~ Joseph Conrad

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

~ Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.

~ Joseph Conrad

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

~ Joseph Conrad

It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]

~ Joseph Conrad

The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe

~ Joseph Conrad

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.

~ Joseph Conrad

He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.

~ Joseph Conrad

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.

~ Joseph Conrad

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.

~ Joseph Conrad

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

~ Joseph Conrad

It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.

~ Joseph Conrad

I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humblesurroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--inall the exalted elements of romance.

~ Joseph Conrad

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

~ Joseph Conrad

...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

~ Joseph Conrad

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

~ Joseph Conrad

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

~ Joseph Conrad

He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.

~ Joseph Conrad

There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.

~ Joseph Conrad

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

~ Joseph Conrad

There werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows.

~ Joseph Conrad

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...

~ Joseph Conrad

We live as we dream--alone....

~ Joseph Conrad

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.

~ Joseph Conrad

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone...

~ Joseph Conrad

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...

~ Joseph Conrad

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

~ Joseph Conrad

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

~ Joseph Conrad

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness

~ Joseph Conrad

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

~ Joseph Conrad

I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

~ Joseph Conrad

This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain...

~ Joseph Conrad

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

~ Joseph Conrad

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher thanthe wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing thatcouldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?

~ Joseph Conrad

His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.

~ Joseph Conrad