Best 343 quotes of Joseph Conrad on MyQuotes

5: Social security will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1944: The G.I. Bill will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1965: Medicare will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1994: Health care will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country!

A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and for war as well?...It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one's legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one.

All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality .

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.

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

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.

A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror!

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.

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.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

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

Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.

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.

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

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

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

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.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

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

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

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.