Quotes from Joseph Conrad

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know.

for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence...

The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries..acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural...

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

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

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

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others

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 than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.

The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.

All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put it's trust in life!

She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

And a word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.

The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.

And after all, one does not die of it. Die of what? I asked swiftly. Of being afraid.

It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.

The sight of it made the earth seem unearthly. They were accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there-- there you could look at a thing monstrous, beautiful, and free.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so as to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in - your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

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