Quotes from Joseph Conrad

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

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

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? 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 the very essence of dreams...

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.

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.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

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.

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

My task is to make you hear, to make you feel,and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.

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

One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.

Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don't know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

It is when we try to grapple with another man's 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. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.