Quotes from Joseph Conrad

Adev?rata via?? a unui om este aceea care i se acord? în mintea altora pe baza respectului sau a dragostei fireÈ™ti.

The only thing that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses.  Without emotion there is no action.

Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.

don't like work— no man does—but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself.

that a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character.

Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate—or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.

Sentimentul continuit??ii vieÈ›ii se bazeaz? pe neînsemnate impresii corporale. Banalit??ile vieÈ›ii cotidiene constituie o armur? pentru suflet.

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.

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.

He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea.

He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from the serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts.

on the floor of a lofty portico. 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. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know. To some place where they expected to get something

Wir gehen mit Worten Kompromisse ein. Es hilft uns auch nicht weiter.Es ist wie ein Wald in dem niemand den Weg kennt. Man ist verloren, während man noch ruft: Ich bin gerettet.

In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

this month past. They had been engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a

The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.  There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable.  Those are the fanatics.  The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries

efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. 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.

Long after he had vanished, Nostromo, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, I am not dead yet.

Era o femeie zvelt?, într-o rochie neagr? din m?tase. O frunte înalt?, tr?s?turi regulate È™i buzele delicat conturate st?teau m?rturie frumuseÈ›ii ei trecute. ?edea dreapt? într-un jilÈ›... Mâinile subÈ›iri îi z?ceau în poal?, imobilitatea ei facial? avea ceva monahal.

Le superbe pretese di un'umanità, che le intemperie bastavano ad opprimere miseramente, gli apparvero una cosa disperatamente, enormemente vana, degno di spregio, di meraviglia, di compassione.

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 too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to….

brooding over the upper reaches, became

a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird.

This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be.