Quotes from Joseph Conrad

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the August light of abiding memories.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.

In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.

They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. 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.

He was little more than a voice. And I heard-him-it-this voice-other voices-all of them were so little more than voices-and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense.

but heavens! how that man could talk! He electrified large meetings. He had faith—don't you see?—he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid Ã¢â'¬Å"leader of an extreme party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He was an—an—extremist.

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.

The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.

Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service.

the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty—all equal before sleep, death's brother.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

No influential friend would have served me better. She [the steamboat] had given me a chance to come out a bit-to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work,-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means.

The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion.

We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring.

But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

I don't know the world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too solitary - I am too young to trust my own opinions.

Do you see him? 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...

The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.

Skepticism is the tonic of the mind .

Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind - completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to a few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solititude and want of faith in himself and others.