Quotes from Joseph Conrad

The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.

I wouldn't have mentioned the fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time.

Over the white rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but the bodies were lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled narrow niches for coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary.

Sympathy is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time.

Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement.

pisica z?cea în braÈ›ele ei într-o aristocrat? beatitudine È™i meditativ? ca un sfinx.

He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.

But it was mere aimless wandering; he had written nothing, collected nothing, brought nothing for science out of the twilight of the forests, which seemed to cling to his battered personality limping about Sulaco, where it had drifted in casually, only to get stranded on the shores of the sea.

bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What

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 of the very essence of dreams …

The demonstration must be against learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible… What do you think of having a go at astronomy?

Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but hang me if I don't believe that some women could live by love alone.

listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.

One rule holds good of most young men—whether rich or poor. They never have money for the necessaries of life, but they have always money to spare for their caprices—an anomaly which finds its explanation in their youth and in the almost frantic eagerness with which youth grasps at pleasure.

this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the

Cuando era un muchacho, me apasionaban los mapas. Podía pasar horas mirando Sudamérica, África o Australia inmerso en los placeres de la exploración. En aquella época quedaban muchos lugares desconocidos en la tierra, y cuando veía en un mapa alguno que pareciera particularmente atractivo (aunque todos lo parecen), ponía el dedo sobre él y decía: "Cuando sea mayor iré allí".

Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.

things are wanted for the work of the world. 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. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know; but the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

Allí estaba el río, fascinante y letal como una serpiente.

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.

No, no es modestia exactamente. No estoy nada seguro de ser modesto;

soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomotion.