Quotes from Joseph Conrad

He kept his gaze riveted upon her as a loving man watches the unselfish toil of a delicate woman upon the slender thread of whose existence is hung the whole meaning and joy of the world.

Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span?

In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being?

The earth seemed unearthly.

But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

Let mortals never take a vow in jest; Be faithful and not blind in doing that, As Jephthah was in his first offering

Il restera toujours la peur. Un homme peut détruire toute chose en lui-même : l'amour, la foi, la haine et même le doute. Mais aussi longtemps qu'il tient à la vie, il ne peut pas détruire la peur.

unknown; continents

Brutus and Cassius howl in Hell together

La noche, sin importar cuán muda sea, nunca es totalmente silenciosa a los oídos atentos

Well! well! It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open.

He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.

Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

Cried out to us, Debark, here is the entrance. More than a thousand at the gates I saw Out of the Heavens rained down, who angrily Were saying, Who is this that without death Goes through the kingdom of the people dead?

But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly.

a fuerza no es sino una casualidad nacida de la debilidad de los otros.

At once the senior pilot arose in his mighty bulk and began to struggle into his coat, with awe-inspiring upheavals. The stranger and I hurried impulsively to his assistance, and directly we laid our hands on him he became perfectly quiescent. We had to raise our arms very high, and to make efforts. It was like caparisoning a docile elephant. With a Thanks, gentlemen, he dived under and squeezed himself through the door in a great hurry.

Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.

One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death.

When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.

I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there - eh? And there are other advantages. The whole civilized world has heard of Greenwich... Yes, he continued, with a contemptuous smile, the blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.

It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.