Quotes from Joseph Conrad

No, I'd rather be like myself, bad as I am.

It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness.

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on.

It is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright—an extra-terrestrial touch. I ask myself with wonder—how the world can look to them—whether it has the shape and substance `we know, the air `we breathe! Sometimes I fancy it must be a region of unreasonable sublimities seething with the excitement of their adventurous souls, lighted by the glory of all possible risks and renunciations.

Some of them must be dead, he believed. The rest would go on fighting. . . .

If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars, he said.

And to a place I come where nothing shines.

Our fatherland is suffering, not from the incursion of a score of alien tongues, but from our own acts, in that, in addition to the lawful administration, there has grown up a second administration possessed of infinitely greater powers than the system established by law.

Those who tow'rds Acheron do not descend.

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.

don't in the least understand why men can't live without wars.

Por esa razón afirmo que Kurtz era un hombre notable. Él tenía algo que decir. Lo decía. Desde el momento en que yo mismo me asomé al borde, comprendí mejor el sentido de su mirada, que no podía ver la llama de la vela, pero que era lo suficiente amplia como para abrazar el universo entero, lo suficiente penetrante como para introducirse en todos los corazones que baten en la oscuridad. Había resumido, había juzgado. «¡El horror!».

Es extraño lo lejos que están las mujeres de la realidad. Viven en un mundo propio que jamás ha existido y que nunca podrá existir. Es demasiado hermoso y, si quisieran construirlo, se vendría abajo antes de la primera puesta de sol. Cualquiera de las malditas cosas con las que los hombres llevamos conviviendo sin problemas desde el día de la creación se pondría de por medio y lo desharía en pedazos.

The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments.

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 council with this great solitude - and the whisper has proved irresistibly fascinating.

There are no words for the sort of things I wanted to say. If I had opened my lips just then I would have simply howled like an animal. I was asking myself when I would wake up.

having been a valetudinarian

There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man's mind. He will pray and blaspheme, and will curse the day he ever heard of it, and will let his last hour come upon him unawares, still believing that he missed it only by a foot. He will see it every time he closes his eyes. He will never forget it till he is dead—and even then Doctor, did you ever hear of the miserable gringos on Azuera, that cannot die?

Thither went afterwards the Chosen Vessel, To bring back comfort thence unto that Faith, Which of salvation's way is the beginning.

worth the candle.

Envy and Arrogance and Avarice Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled.

Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors.

It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil.

He had a good healthy sense of meum, and as little of tuum as he could help.