Quotes by Joseph Conrad

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

Happiness happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

It is when we try to grapple with another mans 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.

Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

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.

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

How does one kill fear? ... How do you shoot a specter through the heart slash off its spectral head take it by its spectral throat?

No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Felicity felicity ... is quaffed out of a golden cup ... the flavour is with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts.... I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

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

The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage hardihood endurance faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever outlast the sea the earth and all men.

He is romantic—romantic,” he repeated. “And that is very bad—very bad. . . . Very good, too,” he added. “But is he?” I queried.‘“Gewiss,” he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but without looking at me. “Evident! What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him—exist?”‘At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim’s existence—starting from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world—but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. “Perhaps he is,” I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; “but I am sure you are.” With his head dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again. “Well—I exist, too,” he said.

It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each others constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on